


First Act

by fadeverb



Series: Kai and Mannie [2]
Category: In Nomine
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-11
Updated: 2013-08-12
Packaged: 2017-12-23 04:19:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 16
Words: 51,074
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/921911
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fadeverb/pseuds/fadeverb
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Kai has a Role and a job and a nice peaceful life doing Ofanite of Creation sorts of things. Right up until some Windy friends show up and ask for a favor.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. In Which An Ofanite Falls In With Bad Company

**Author's Note:**

> Behold, the first In Nomine fanfic I ever wrote! I still think it's a fun story, but I make no promises about pacing. I'll be putting up all of the Kai stories (at least of those in one solid continuity) with some very light editing. They could probably use a brisk edit, but that's old fiction for you.

My phone cord is always tangled into knots because I can't stop moving when I'm on the phone. I'm told I should get a cell phone, or at least a wireless phone, but these people are missing the point. I have to have something for the movement. Gotta be something to tangle or all that walking in circles doesn't do any good.

Once a soul back homeside asked if it bothered me, the stereotypes, like we're forced to conform to some arbitrary pattern. And I said no, it didn't bother me, no more than humans are bothered by the stereotype about how they keep needing to breath, sleep, eat, the way that hormones and chemicals twist them around. I spin, I burn, that's what I am, so it's what I do. Humans worry about feeding themselves, and I worry about how to get the phone cord untwisted so that I can get the receiver far enough from the phone that I can answer and move.

Which I can't, today. So I find myself kneeling on the floor with the receiver in my ear and the phone pulled halfway over onto the floor. I keep the phone itself on a short cord; any longer and it'd get twisted into knots too.

It's not the Boss, on the phone. It hasn't been the Boss in longer than I want to think about. I know that he has something big planned, something so big he couldn't let anyone but Dominic in on it, but it hurts, sometimes, that he couldn't tell us. It's fair, it's perfectly fair, the Boss is...just. But it hurts. At least I know he's right, that it'll turn out well in the end. I tell the triad every time they come by to check on me, and I appreciate it, that their Boss knows enough to do this favor for mine, to make sure we're keeping things going while he's...out. Somewhere. Wherever it is that he went.

But no, it's not the Boss, it's just my off and on roommate, who pays his half of the rent in cash whenever he comes through. "Russia," he says. "Ever been there?"

"Ah. No?" I have, in fact, never been further than a hundred miles from this place, not on the corporeal plane. I've run through three vessels in that time, and a few Roles, but not much space. "If you're calling from Russia, Jack, I'm not sure I can help you."

"No, no, not _from_ Russia, to Russia." For a Mercurian he jumps tracks faster than I can follow, which is why, I think, we get along so well. Windys are hard buddies to keep around, and they'd get on my nerves if they did stick around long, but the best sort of friends to have when they come and go. I can appreciate the way they move.

"Never been to Russia," I say, and I work on untwisting the cord from the knot it's made. Somewhere out there, there has to be someone with the power to untangle any knot, and I take a moment to wonder if there is an Angel of Untying Knots. It wouldn't be a half-bad Word, if taken to its logical extreme. Figuring out solutions, resolving problems... In any case, this knot is not coming undone. Time to buy another cord. "Why do you ask?"

"What about China? Ever been to China?"

"No, never been outside this country." The smell of toast burning reminds me that I forgot to adjust the toaster setting again. No matter; food is an art I've never been able to appreciate properly, much as I've tried, and burnt toast won't damn anyone. So far as I know. Has anyone been damned somehow by burnt toast? Stranger things have happened, if that story about the eel soufflé and the Calabite is true. Will have to ask a Seraph sometime. "What's up?"

"I was thinking, buddy mine, it's time for a trip."

"It's always time for a trip with you," I say, and manage to yank the cord out of the phone. By the time I've put it back in and put out the fire in the kitchen, the phone's ringing. "Kai!" I say, dropping to my knees again. It's still not the Boss.

"You should start thinking about a trip," he says. "Like, in the next few days. Or how about tonight? I could pick you up tonight."

"I have a class to teach in half an hour," I say, which is partially true; I'm not the teacher, but I do most of the teaching. Who'd ever pick up on ballet if I left it to the twits hired because of board politics? If I didn't know better I'd swear the director was an Impudite of the Game, and...hmm. Now there's an avenue of investigation. "Why the sudden urge for a road trip?"

There's the sort of pause that says he's realigning his mental track to run parallel to my own. Never did understand the attraction in trains, all straight lines, but they move beautifully fast, don't they? "I'll pick you up tonight," he says, "and we can talk later. Might want to find a sub." This time he clicks off from whatever pay phone he's using, leaving me with a dial tone and one hand that's managed to get tangled up in the cord.

I'm not the brightest of angels, I'll grant anyone that. I jump to conclusions too quickly, act too hastily, ignore the subtle when the obvious is begging to be smacked down with a two by four. Which is something of a cliche, and yet practical if that's all you have at hand. Me, anything at hand is a good thing to beat stuff down with, if stuff is, indeed, demanding to be beaten down. But! All this aside, even I know when the wind's changed direction. Something's up, and it's not something Jack wanted to talk about over the phone. Fine, fine. I'll arrange for a sub, I'll be ready to move. Maybe it's a weekend trip.

So with a mumble about a family emergency (and I think the board director was smirking behind that sympathetic expression, must look into the Impudite thing), I get a sub set up and myself ready to go. Clean socks because you can never have enough clean socks, my piccolo because it's hard to pack the bagpipes into a bag that'll fit on a motorcycle, and that nice silk scarf in case any demons need garroting.

At three in the morning I'm so bored with waiting that I've unraveled a sweater, made myself a crochet hook out of a series of paperclips, and I'm teaching myself how to crochet from online diagrams, when the door finally opens. I locked it because I knew he'd enjoy picking the lock; I don't think we ever made him a copy of the key.

"Jack!" I toss the snarled mess of yarn away to give him a hug, and take a step back to admire the new jacket. "Where did you get that?"

"Don't ask, don't tell," he says, and grins broadly. His current vessel is so dark-skinned that his eyes and teeth nearly gleam in contrast. It's an artistic effect, and the black jacket sets it off. Some day I'll have to get around to learning to paint, and make a picture that does justice to the image; for now, I have my piccolo, my bagpipes, and an awfully good grasp of ballet, if I say so myself. "Ready to go?"

"My bike's downstairs..."

"Leave it," he says, and drags me to the car that's waiting in the parking lot, double-parked with the engine running. "Too traceable. You went and _registered_ it under your name."

"That's because I'm being legal," I say, and take the shotgun seat, since there are two people in the back. Jack slides behind the wheel and in a moment we're off, whipping down the street and through every stop sign without so much as a pause. I wish I were driving, but I can't begrudge a Windy the seat. "So where are we off to?"

"Long story, we'll get to it soon," Jack says, and jerks a thumb over his shoulder at the two in the back seat. "Kai, that's Kelly--you remember her, she was in that big scary killer-girl vessel last time you saw her--and next to her, that's Maharang, also known as Mannie, also known as a _very_ former Servitor of, um," Jack leans close to me and mutters quietly, "Vapula."

There's a bit of a commotion in the back, and Kelly, who is wearing a vessel that's far too petite and pristine for her personality, hauls the demon away from the door. "Sorry," says the demon, and oddly enough, he sounds contrite. "It's, ah. The name. I get...twitchy."

"Child safety locks," Jack says. "Marvelous invention."

I twist around in my seat to take a closer look at the demon. He has the pale, unkempt look of a Vapulan who's done lab work, and the twitchy expression of any Renegade who isn't sure they've noticed him missing. Too tall to be comfortable in that back seat, and my first guess would be Balseraph, though it's easier to ask than to guess. "Hi," he says, and tries a smile. It doesn't look like he wears one often. "Kai, he said?"

"Yeah." I don't want to be hostile to a redemption candidate, but we're not driving towards any Tether I know of. And they wouldn't need my help for that. "So what's up?"

"It's, ah..." He blinks at me several times. "I hate to ask this, but are you male or female?"

I sit back down, and check inside my pants. "Male," I say. The last two vessels were female, and it's easy to forget. Back around to stare at him some more. "So, you were saying?"

"No taunting," Jack says, and pulls me to face the front. "Kelly, why don't you summarize?"

"It's simple," Kelly says, and there's a pause. "Jack, why don't you go over it?"

"Right," Jack says. "It's...simple." He turns halfway away from the wheel, because he's the sort of person who can't talk without gesturing. It seems common in Mercurians. "Mannie here is sick and tired of working for...you know who."

"You mean Va--ah, you know who, yes, I do know who." There's a thump in the back from where the demon's hit the car door again. "And you're taking him promptly to a Tether, right?"

"Not quite! It's simple. He has to find Eli first."

Even my mind has to stop for a moment after that line. "He wants to what?"

"Find Eli. It's...oh, look. Kelly, you explain it."

Kelly sighs a wispy little sigh that's appropriate for her current vessel and not for her. I don't know what her Boss was thinking, to give her that one. "He wants to redeem," she says, "but he's hesitant about his chances, being a not common redemption type, and having heard stories about Judgment. You know how it goes. So he wants reassurance from Eli that he wouldn't be disassembled if he tries to redeem. Because Eli, being the wandering sort, is the only person whose word he'll trust on the subject."

I take a moment to work this through in my head, while Jack hits the freeway and begins to see how fast this clunky old car will go. It's true that whatever my Boss says goes, and that Eli would, on consideration, have a plausible reliability to Renegades, who are not reasonable even at their best. "So, what, you expect me to find Eli, just because I work for him? I mean, that's a great vote of confidence on your part, but if I knew where to find him, the triads wouldn't keep asking if I'd seen him lately." There's another small thump when I mention triads. Twitchy guy, that demon.

"It's...a bit more complicated." Kelly coughs. "Um. Jack?"

"Right. So, Mannie, a good long while back, happened to appropriate an interesting little item that, as he heard, Eli made. And so as a gesture of goodwill, he wants to give it back to Eli when he finds the guy."

I can't help the twitch. "And he doesn't have it anymore, and you want to find the item, find Eli, and get this all sorted out before Va--you-know-who, the Game, Judgment, or anyone else finds out that this guy has gone missing."

"Always the quick one!" Jack grins at me, and darts between a furniture truck and an SUV at something over 90 miles an hour; it's hard to tell, seeing as the speedometer on this car pegs at 85. "Obvious. Simple. You along for the ride?"

"Why do you need my help? Sounds like you know what you're up to."

"Well," Jack says, and gestures vaguely. "We're not sure where this thing is, and Eli isn't easy to track down, and, ah, you're the only Creationer we know who _isn't_ in service to someone else and is kinda on Judgment's good side."

"Not for long at this rate," I say, "but I'm happy to help." Redeeming demons is even better than beating them up, though the gratification is more delayed. "But I'd like one thing."

"Yes?" Jack frowns slightly, and I know he's wondering if I'm going to insist they take ballet lessons, or report to Judgment as soon as we talk to Eli, or something terrifying along those lines.

"I get to drive."

"Deal," he says, and we swap seats at something that's at least 85 miles per hour, and only swerve far enough to send the car rattling along the rumble strips along the highway twice during the crossover. I crank down the window to let the wind howl in, and it's a beautiful sunrise when it comes.

We stop for gas at a rundown station in a town consisting of the gas station, a bar, and a McDonalds, which I could take as a sign of the end times. Kelly's sticking to the demon like a Cherub to the toddler it's attuned to; which is to say, Mannie paces and twitches and sulks, and Kelly watches intently, and never gets far away. They head inside to prepay with cash, and Jack leans against the car while I wrestle with the gas nozzle.

"How did you run into that one?" Kelly and Jack are great guys, but not the sort to spend a lot of time working on redemptions unless one drops into their lap.

"Divine providence," Jack says, which is his favorite answer for all sorts of questions, especially ones about where he got credit cards with unfamiliar names on them. But this time he bothers to clarify, so far as Jack clarifies anything; he's fond enough of confusing any issue that he must give Revelation Servitors headaches. "He was hitchhiking, figured it was time to do a good deed, and, well." Jack shrugs, and plays with a lighter, probably in response to the sign about open flames near the gas pumps. "Kelly was all for knocking him over the head and dropping him off at the nearest Tether, but I didn't think that would help _him_ much, even if it was convenient for us."

Besides, I think it would have been too much like following the rules. I'm not the ultimate conformist, but I don't do chaos the way Windys do. Sometimes it makes me a bit uncomfortable when they break the rules just because the rules are there. But that's the point of their job, isn't it? Half my favorite music wouldn't be there if everyone kept following the same old rules, and look at the way Ulysses mangles the English language into something beautifully different. So even if I don't see myself asking their Boss for temp work, I'm not about to gripe at them about the way they do things.

"So what is he?" I ask, because this is the question that's been burning at me since I got the previous burning question, what in the world they were doing, out of the way. "I can never tell with Renegades, they all end up twitchy and worried."

"Lilim," Jack says, and grins like a maniac, which he is.

"Can't be," I say. "He's, well. A he. Right?" I've never been good at figuring out gender and sex and all the weirdness that goes with it, which is why I try to avoid noting either one to much extent in my own vessels, but I thought I had the demon pegged from clothes and haircut, if nothing else.

"It's not like there aren't any male Lilim," Jack points out, "or even ones that happen to take male vessels, at that."

"But he's not all...Lilimy."

"So he's on his best behavior. He doesn't have time to accumulate favors while he's running for his life, right?" Jack puts the nozzle back, and shreds the receipt that prints from the pump. "As he tells it, he's pretty much in the clear if he can redeem. He's been around for a good long time, and worked off most of his favors."

I shake my head. "He'll have a hard time of it, from what I've heard. But I'm willing to lend a hand. Where are we heading from here?" We've been traveling north since we left, and east because that's where the highway happens to go.

Jack just grins, and slides back into the car. "Drive," he says, "and we'll tell you if you're going the wrong way."

Mannie and Kelly return with coffee all around, and multiple packets of frightening sugar and flour...things. By the time I've reached the highway again, Jack's downed two puffy white cake-items and is working his way through a pack of Twinkies. "I don't know how you can eat that," I say, and neatly pass a little sports car that doesn't seem to realize a foot of clearance on each side is more than enough for practical purposes. "Mass-produced, unhealthy junk. You should try cooking."

"Sure, if I want to burn down the kitchen. I've seen the terrors of cooking, and I do indeed fear them." Jack tosses me a hideous mockery of actual cinnamon buns. I catch it and toss it out the window. "Hey, now you're littering. Don't you feel _bad_ about that?"

"It would be wrong of me to allow that to be eaten," I say. "We're coming up on a junction. Where are we going from here?"

Both of them turn to look at Mannie, and I realize they haven't been given better directions than I have. "Give me a location," I tell him, "and I'll get there. C'mon, I'm an Ofanite. You know that's what I'm good at."

"Last I saw, ah, it," Mannie says, "that was in Moscow. But that was...a long time ago." I've tilted the rearview mirror so that I can see the back seat, and his long fingers make strange, nervous gestures. I would have called him a Bal, if I'd been forced to guess; all the battered elegance and height doesn't seem suited to a Lilim.

"Okay, then. Airport or docks? Airport's more traceable, but faster, so you'll want to weigh anonymity against speed. Personally, I'd go for speed, and, well, airports! Gotta love the planes." I tilt the steering wheel slightly, and glide around a truck hauling something so oversized it has a second little truck tootling along with it to warn people of the load. "Of course, boats are nice, even if the drivers get annoyed if you call them boats instead of ships."

"Neither," says the demon, a little irritably. "I said I last saw it in Moscow. It won't be there anymore." He taps one of his jacket pockets, as if he wanted to take something out and changed his mind. "I think... There's this small town in the north." He gestures towards the road ahead of us. "Or, there was. It's gone now, which is how I know it's there."

I take a minute to sort out his pronouns. "So, whoever it is that has this whatever it is that you stole from someone or other and that you think was made by the Boss... You can tell it's somewhere to the north because some town or another isn't there anymore?"

"Yes," he say. "Precisely."

"Ah," I say. "Simple." And I take the next exit to skew west.

Jack's eyes gleam when we stop for gas inside a small city. The parking lot across the street from the gas station is for some expensive restaurant, and filled with shiny cars that must be expensive. "This station wagon is cramped," he says, as I get out the gas nozzle. "Want to try another car?"

"The car's fine," I say, but he's jaywalking nonchalantly across the street, Kelly close behind. I roll my eyes, and keep filling the tank.

Mannie sidles up to me, and contrives to look pathetic and in need of protection, though it's hard for him to manage when his vessel is six inches taller than mine. "Do you think he'll mind?" he asks, slouching a touch. He uses body language the way a Balseraph uses words, though he has all the accuracy in his aim of a new-fledged Malakite playing with guns. He'd be better off whimpering at Jack, who's been a soft touch for repentant and helpless sorts for as long as I've known him. "I'm bringing it back, and I am sorry about stealing it before..."

"Who, the Boss?" I think about that, not for long. "Yeah, if you're sorry, he'll _know_. He's not the sort to begrudge someone borrowing things if they were put to good use." That does make the demon squirm, and I remind myself that we're supposed to be helping this guy. Bad Kai: be nice. "The Boss is a great guy, and he _understands_ people, like no one else at all." Okay, maybe Dominic understands people too, but in a different way. The Archangel of Judgment understands you like Seraph and Malakite, zenith to nadir, everything you did or said that you shouldn't have or didn't mean. My Boss understands people like a Cherub and Mercurian all in one, from hub to rim, and loves you for it or despite it. 

I'm missing the Boss again, so I turn away from this demon who thinks my Boss, who's got something bigger going on than almost anyone knows, is some sort of get out of Hell free ticket, and busy myself with putting the gas nozzle away and studying the receipt like it means something. "I'll get some coffee," Mannie says, and he slouches off to the convenience store.

Kelly and Jack take longer to return than I'd expected, and I'm about ready to try looking for them when they saunter back, radiating cheer and a lack of couth. While I'm not the sort to pick up on subtle things, I notice that Kelly has blood under her fingernails. "Met someone dishonorable?"

"Better yet," Jack says, and _he_ has blood under his fingernails too, which says something, "met someone dishonorable who had a nice car."

"Had a nice car? As in, had a car, or as in, the car _was_ nice?"

"Little bit of both," Kelly says, and takes the coffee Mannie hands her, though it's no more than warm by now. "Wasn't trying to hurt the car, but, well, bodies leave dents."

Now some of my own cheer is starting to return. "Demon in the trunk?" They didn't take any rope with them, and I'm about to ask them if they used jumper cables when Kelly shakes her head, still grinning.

"Rolled on the wandering demon table, and apparently he rolled on the wandering angel table, but we came out ahead in the encounter," Jack says, and I have no idea what he means. If I did, it wouldn't really be Jack. "I don't think anyone is going to miss that one, though her master may have something to say about it when she wakes up."

"And you didn't let me join in? You're not letting me have _any_ fun on this trip." It's at about this time that I realize Mannie is watching us with this horrified expression he's trying to suppress, so I grin at him reassuringly, but it doesn't seem to help. "Ready to go?"

"Yeah," he says, and drops his coffee cup on the ground, and then looks guilty when I pick it up and toss it into the dumpster. Weird one, this Lilim, if that's what he is. But Lilim would have to be weird; I've never been able to wrap my mind around a type of demon that isn't, even in theory, an angel who's taken a wrong turn along the way. Maybe it's some sort of grand cosmic balance to Malakim who can't Fall, or maybe they're just like a twisted version of humanity.

But I don't think the Symphony needs balancing in that direction.


	2. In Which One Must Reconsider The Wisdom Of Dealing With Ethereals

The advantage to not needing sleep is that road trips become easier. The advantage to being me is that we make no wrong turns, don't crash into anything, and average about 25 miles over the speed limit the whole way. The town that isn't a town anymore hums like a kazoo in the back of an exuberant children's band, as Symphony metaphors go. It's waving its arms around and leaping up and down saying, pick me, pick me!

The sky has swept itself into a brilliant red sunset as I pull off the back-country road I've been traveling on to follow a pothole-riddled older road to the town. The dashboard is carved with cute stick-figure pictures of angels beating up demons and carrying off various heists, courtesy of a pocketknife and a very bored Jack. Kelly, for her part, has maintained the Zen serenity she carries with her whenever Jack gets too bouncy, the counterpoint to the way he goes reasonable when she gets too eager to smite. It's still odd to see her in the new vessel, and I'd like to ask what happened to the old one, but I'm not sure they want to talk about it in front of this demon.

"Well," I say, stopping the car in the middle of the street, "here we are."

The street's a mess of potholes and brown grass, the result of winter and nature taking effect without anything to counterbalance them. The gas station displays prices so low it must have closed over a decade ago, and half the numbers have fallen off the sign. The glass is long gone in the store windows, the paint has worn into pale peeling strips. "Dead town," I say. I'm not fond of death, metaphorical or otherwise.

"Long dead," says Kelly. She sits down on the hood of the car and looks around, her fingers working at prying the BMW logo off. "So, Mannie. What are we looking for, and why do you think it'll be here?"

The demon wraps his arms around himself, and the wind's sharp, but not enough to justify his shiver. "There was a Tether here," he said, "a long time ago. Not to...you know who, but to something else. An ethereal. It traveled here, to set up new worship, when, ah." He touches his pocket. "It wasn't welcome in Russia anymore, but there were people here..."

"And the town died?"

"After it came. Eventually. It couldn't manage a town. Lasted for a while, but..." He shakes his head. "I don't know how it works. That wasn't my area of study. There were all these things one could do with electricity, and..." The demon has developed an annoying habit of trailing off when he's about to say something useful, and it makes me impatient. I pace around the car while he collects his thoughts. "It's destructive," he says, "and it makes for a slow decay. In a town this size, he could last, ah, decades, maybe a century, but...this was inevitable." His hands make small gestures. "I heard from it, a few years back. Still out here. Complaining that the town had died, and it had no one to carry it away. I don't know why it couldn't leave, but it wanted me to come and help it. I, ah. I stay out of the Marches, these days. No good comes of going there."

"An ethereal." Jack drums his fingers along the roof of the car. "Interesting. And it has this item?"

"Yes, it...well. It should." His hands twist together. "I was in Russia. We knew that flying machines would be the next big thing, and it seemed prudent to make governments look in the correct directions, but of course everyone has their own agenda..."

Kelly stares at him, with that expression she wears when she's about to figure out how honorable you've been. "Where did you get it?"

The demon shrugs. "I don't know who had it before. The politics were strange, and I was working my way up to a position of some responsibility, so I had, ah, access to things that had been taken from people. But when I say it was stolen, I mean it was taken from someone else, I acquired it... It's close enough to theft on my part, to count me guilty for it. At the time I didn't realize what it was."

"And what was it?" I'm doing figure eights now, with three loops, Kelly car demon, kicking rocks out of my way. Must remember to change my socks soon, all the driving and all the dust make for a grimy feeling I could do without. "You're being awfully vague for someone who's supposed to be getting our help."

"I don't know what it was," Mannie says, and now I can tell he's frustrated, though he's clipping his words to keep it in check. "But at the time I thought it was a simple little artifact, and someone Needed it, so of _course_ I was willing to trade it away for a favor. I used that up getting myself out of the country when things went crashing down, because of _course_ no one bothers to communicate to anyone else that things are about to go bloody, and it's not like the Malphans talk to the Vapulans--" He freezes, and his face goes blank, and then Kelly tackles him and the two of them are down on the dusty ground, which I suspect wasn't necessary but was funny enough to watch that I don't mind.

"I'm fine!" he says, and then, more calmly, "No, really. I'm fine. You can let me up."

Kelly clambers off him, and he gets to his feet, doesn't bother to brush the dust off his clothing. Now that's the sign of a nervous Lilim if I've ever seen one. "Sorry," he says, and again, "sorry, sorry..." He pulls himself together. It's like watching an actor playing two parts switch from one to the other, and I'd like to ask him if he's done any work on stage, because he'd make a marvelous Mercutio, if not, perhaps, a good King Lear, because he doesn't have the presence needed to play that sort of role. "In any case," he says, "it ought to be somewhere near the main house of the ranch. Shouldn't be too hard to find."

"More should and ought to's than I'm comfortable with," Kelly says, but she says it with the sort of shrug that adds that she can cope.

"I'm only wondering," I say, though I'm wondering all sorts of things and choosing to focus on this one topic to the temporary exclusion of others, "why this ethereal would still be here, if the town is dead. It's not something I know much about, but why would it hang around when all its potential worshippers are gone?"

"I don't know," says Mannie. "It sent word that it was here and wanted my help. I expect it believed I'd consider the Geas worth the trip. It is powerful." He spreads his hands, entirely under control, and I think I was more comfortable with him when he was twitchier. "But I need to get that artifact back."

"Fine," Jack says. "Let's go."

The road is bad enough that we leave the car sitting alone in the middle of town and traipse through overgrown weeds to the ranch. Rusted signs proclaim the name, Sunshine Hills Ranch, and sunshine must sound pleasant enough in a place this far north. There isn't much in the way of proper hills, only low rolling mounds, and scraggly trees have grown up across what was probably pastures. "What did they raise here?" I ask the demon, but he shrugs, and doesn't know. After spending so long in a place where I know everyone by name and each street, alley, vacant lot, it's strange to be walking through a place none of us know much about. 

My socks fill up with burrs, all the desperate seeds of late summer clinging to me. Such a melancholy sort of place, without even hawks flying overhead. The grasses and trees that have sprung up seem tired, old, waiting for something that won't be coming back. I run my hands over a bush and leaves snap off in my hand.

"There's something wrong here," I say. My feet want to move in the other direction. I've faced down demons before, and here in this empty field coming towards that big plantation-style house, I want to run back to the car, drive away, never come back. At this time of day I ought to be teaching a class to earnest little children who stretch their toes up, up to the rail, and why am I here instead of back there where my Boss left me for his own good reasons?

"Someone hasn't been mowing the lawn often enough," says Kelly, and Jack grins, and the two of them don't get it, they aren't feeling it. But the way Mannie looks at me says that he understands what I mean.

"No," I say, and I realize I don't know how to explain it, but it's wrong. Things that ought to be growing green and straight and curved are growing brown and twisted and sharp. Nothing is being created here, it's only doing what it did before, over and over again. I don't know how to point it out, but it's wrong, it's horribly wrong. "I mean," I say, and I gesture the way Manny did before when he was searching for words, "something _weird_ is going on. I don't know if it's the ethereal or what, but things are...wrong."

The two of them look at me, and they're trying to understand, but they can't feel it. Wind blows through places and scatters everything into a new pattern, but it doesn't make new things. The two of them can read the honor or history of a person with a glance, but they can't feel how motion is supposed to work.

Everything here stays _still_.

"Well," says Jack, and I can see him wrapping his mind around what I said, tying it up into a package that makes sense, "let's go fix it, then." And Kelly nods.

Well. Let's go fix it, then.

I stay in front because if I need to move forward, I want to do it quickly. If any of these plants had flowers I'd hate to crush them, but as it is I tromp through, wishing for those big clunky boots I've seen people wear at the goth clubs when Namuel takes me out dancing. The front door to the house has lost its paint to the wind, but the cut glass set into the top is still beautiful, stars outlined in lead. This house was a work of art, when it was still in good condition, and I think it could be made that way again. If my Boss were here, maybe he'd put me here to do that, spend a decade or three bringing this town back to life, making this house beautiful again. This whole place could be something amazing.

But it's never my Boss on the phone, these days.

The door's locked, but Jack makes quick work of it, and we step into stale air. Someone with bad taste decorated the insides; ostentatious meets frumpy, even before mold, insects, and dust brought it down. A twisting staircase takes up the center of the foyer, winding elegantly upstairs, with banisters that would be perfect for sliding down. "Downstairs, I think," says Mannie, and now he leads the way back to the rest of the rooms on the floor. We try doors until we find the stairs, and don't let each other out of sight. Maybe now they can feel what I did.

There's another door at the bottom of the stairs, heavy wood banded with metal. It's like the door before the vampire's lair or the mad scientist's lab in one of the black and white movies they show late at night when the airwaves aren't taken up with infomercials. Jack fiddles with the lock, and frowns. "It's locked from the other side. See, there's a deadbolt. I can't open that."

"Probably the right place," Kelly says, and she starts pulling out supplies from under her jacket, things I didn't know she was carrying but should have expected. When there's a Malakite of Janus wandering about, there's a fair chance that explosives aren't far away, and Kelly has never been a disappointment. The last time I met up with her, she and Jack had just finished toasting an entire warehouse of I don't know what, and had to lay low for a while until certain parties stopped screaming about the disturbance. She spent most of the two days they crashed at my apartment trying to show me how to boil eggs without doing something dreadful to them, and describing the explosion. It had sounded like a marvelous entertaining explosion, and I, for one, begin to look forward to this.

So Mannie and Jack retreat to the top of the stairs, and Kelly fiddles with wires, and bits of material that I'm guessing are plastic explosives, and after a few minutes she smiles tightly at me and says, "Upstairs, I think." When we get to the top of the stairs, she fiddles with the wires, and tells me, "If you worked for our Boss, you'd be able to help with things like this. And you'd never want for moving around. We _get_ speed."

"I know," I say, and wait for her to finish. Because it's a kind enough offer, and one that Jack's mentioned plenty of times when he's doing his roommate thing. Sometimes it even tempts me, when I'm fighting as politely as I can with the board for funding, scheduling, trying to help the community center matter. When I'm wondering if the Boss is ever going to call, or if maybe he forgot about leaving me there... But, no. I can't start doubting him. Even thinking about it is why he had to ask Dominic to send people by to check on us. The Boss knows what he's doing, and he put me where he did for a reason, and there's no way I can doubt that, or I wouldn't have anything left.

The door explodes.

It is, indeed, a pretty explosion.

"Haven't lost my touch," Kelly says, and slaps Mannie on the back, and Jack laughs, already heading down the stairs two steps at a time, while Mannie picks bits of charred wood out of his hair. Which means Jack's taking the lead, and there's no way I can let him do that, so I charge on past him, three or four stairs to a leap. He may have longer legs, but speed is what I do, and I make it through the door before him into the room.

I immediately wish I hadn't.

The bodies here are dry, decayed, awful wrecks of crumpled limbs and bones. I can't tell what's decay and what's the injury done before death, but I'm sure that the limbs six feet away from their bodies didn't get there by natural decay. In the center of the room a circle, old stains, and a churning, thrashing darkness, worse than trying to stare at a Shedite's real form.

"You came," says the thing in the center of the circle, and it shudders, a ripple of color swirling across it. It's the ugliest thing I've ever seen. "I knew you would come eventually, though it took you longer than I thought. You have no respect for old friendships. I won't hold it against you. I need to be free of this place."

Mannie stands behind me, very still. "So I see," he says, a distant voice. I step over bodies and pieces of bodies, walk around the circle. The things on the floor, in flung-open drawers, hung on the walls... I've never seen sorcery, but I've heard about it, and this must be its results. It's all ugly, a room devoted to destruction and what power can be squeezed out of it.

"You've brought me more worshippers," says the dreadful thing, though its voice is uncertain now. "Or colleagues of yours? You always came alone before, but times change."

"Times do change," says Mannie. I'm across the circle from him now, and I can see his hands opening and closing, though he stands still, watching that thing in the center. What does he see when he looks at it? It needs to be free, it says, and I think a Lilim could appreciate that, especially when it wants freedom as much as this thing does, but I wonder what else it needs, and what else he sees in its mind. I am blessed to be of a Choir that never looks into the mind of anyone; I don't see truth or honor or relationships or needs or emotions or any other of a thousand things, but only how to get from here to there in the most perfect way, and this is enough for me. My own mind is enough trouble sometimes, with how it flits and hops and takes the wrong routes, without knowing anything of the minds of anyone else. 

Kelly and Jack stand very still, though the expression Kelly's wearing tells me she's going to do something stupid and violent soon. I don't think the thing that twists in the center of the room fails to ping her evil meter, and she has oaths to keep. It's not much like a Windy to wait long once there's a goal in sight.

"How strange, that you should be caught by humans," Mannie says. His gaze flickers all over the room, looking for that artifact he wants, but nothing I'm seeing shouts artifact to me. "I thought you kept your sorcerers well in hand."

"They grew arrogant," hisses the ethereal, and it seems to me that to be a sorcerer one has to be fairly arrogant in the first place, so growing arrogant is only a natural result. If it was teaching humans sorcery, which to my limited knowledge involves them binding ethereals, you would think it would realize these sorts of things might happen. On the other side of the wheel, it seems people that greatly desire power are easily blinded by that desire. "They thought they could control me, and failed in the attempt." The bodies indicate failure, but I think the entrapment speaks of a certain level of success.

"It's you who's doing it," I say, almost before I realize I'm speaking. I've completed a circuit around the room, and I step over the same bodies as before. "You're the one making things grow badly and die too soon. I don't know if it's by choice or just your nature, but it's you, isn't it?"

The roll of that thing as it turns in my direction, though I couldn't say what was the front or back of it, makes my stomach queasy in a way an empty stomach shouldn't get. "Witness my power," it says, a voice rumbling until my skin vibrates with it and the echoes bounce off all the walls, "and worship, and I shall teach you my ways. Scorn me, and feel my wrath."

"Tell me," I say, before Mannie can try to get a word in and confuse himself further with wondering what he should do, "is that what you really look like, or just a nasty attempt at a vessel?"

The broken desk I swing by one leg connects solidly with a chunky bit of darkness, which answers my question. And there's Kelly pulling a long knife out from her jacket, and Jack grins, stepping forward.

"You betrayed me," roars the ethereal, and Mannie hesitates, shudders, flinches back away from it. This isn't his fight, and if we'd prefer he lend a hand, well, we can't blame him either for not touching this thing.

This thing has the most dreadfully nauseating vessel, but I fear nothing. I've been told this is something of a failing on my part, but I've only hit trauma twice, so it can't be too much of a downside. I lunge forward as it's reaching for Mannie, and I am fire and circles and speed, faster than anything this poor creature of the mind could ever be. This desk transcends its misused existence to be a weapon of a servant of God, against all things foul and evil.

The desk smashes into pieces on the second hit, but I think it fulfilled its purpose, after such a long sad wait in this cellar.

I take up another piece of furniture, slam it down at the flailing thing in the center of the circle. It can't escape, but it's stronger than I suspected, resisting our blows too easily. It lashes out with a churning tentacle and envelops Jack's arm up to the elbow. He yelps, pulls his arm out, and all the way down from the elbow the flesh of his vessel boils and melts, dissolving away from the rest of him.

Mannie runs for the stairs, and I would call him a coward for doing it, but I have more important things to focus on. Every bit of furniture in the room smashes into that dreadful creature in turn, and Kelly slice, slice, slices with her knives, staying just out of reach of its flailing. Jack hesitates, turns, runs after Mannie, and it's just as well that someone is, because Kelly and I have our hands full.

Kelly's keeping that thing occupied, but I'm running out of furniture. I'm not desperate enough yet to beat this thing to death with corpse bits. Not sure it would work if I tried, at that; while my Boss has given me help in the "beating things up with unlikely objects" department, using actual limbs seems wrong, especially when they belong to other people. It can't reach outside of the circle, so it's easy enough for me to stay away, but Kelly's having a hard time of keeping it from touching her. A mouth opens in the center of its mass, and it begins to roar out something that I suspect will go badly for us.

A leftover piece of door flies into the ethereal, and bounces off, as Jack hauls Mannie into the room. The ethereal breaks off in its roar, and snarls at the demon, a low rumble in a language that hurts my ears to hear it. "Do something," Jack says, shoving Mannie forward, and the Lilim cowers. "Something!"

Mannie opens his mouth, begins to sing. And the twisted diseased thing bursts into flames, like a lightning strike from the roof.

"That's more like it." Jack grins, and pokes Mannie in the back. The demon twitches. "Can you do that again?"

"Once more," Mannie says. He sings again, and the fire rages hotter. Still trapped in its circle, the ethereal roars, screams, its voice spiraling higher in pitch as it goes. Ash falls to the floor, eating away at the wood where it lands.

The shrieking stops, and all that's left of the thing's vessel is a heap of corrosive ash on the floor.

"My arm," says Jack, staring at the stump below his elbow. "It's--ow. Ow. That still hurts." He wears an expression of faint confusion, as he waves his arm about. "How did it do that?"

"Disease," Mannie says. "You haven't dealt much with ethereals, have you? They can do...strange things. Different things. There are so many of them, you can't track down all the combinations. Not unless you specialize."

"Do you have healing?" Kelly asks, staring at that stump. None of us wants to touch it, but it's fascinating, an ugly rough cut that bubbles at the edges.

"Of course," Mannie says. "It's often a Need--I mean, yes, I have it, but I can't use it, not after those two songs."

I crouch down by one of the corpses, and pick up a statue, a thing a bit bigger than my palm, carved from stone. It's nearly a Mobius strip, strange curves and no single shape. "Is this what you were looking for?"

"Yes!" Mannie pulls it out of my hands, and I think he'd hug it if we weren't watching. "That's the one. I'll give it back, and everything will be right."

Jack blinks a few times, and touches the statue hesitantly with his remaining hand. "That's... strange. It's a talisman, I think. For sorcery."

"Then it can't be what you're looking for," I say. "The Boss wouldn't make something like that."

"No, I'm quite sure." Mannie puts the statue in his pocket, and he smiles, a wicked little smile like a mad scientist ought to have. I'm not sure if he's mad, but he must be a scientist to have worked for Vapula, and sanity doesn't seem to accompany those Servitors very often. "It has that fuzz about it that comes when Superiors dabble in making artifacts."

"The Boss doesn't _dabble_ ," I say, "and he wouldn't make something like that--"

"Oh, don't worry about it," Kelly says. "We've done good for the day, we've found Mannie's statue, and now we can go find Eli to get this redemption thing working."

Everyone is looking at me. Because of course they expect me to find him. And I wish I were back home trying to untangle my phone cord again, because if I were there I'd be where he left me, doing what he told me to do. What else can I do? What am I doing out here, with these people who don't ever understand? But I'll see this through to the end one way or another.

I can't help but smile at them. "I'll do what I can. We'll go looking for him. But it may take a while. He never writes," I say. Maybe I should get a cell phone. "He never calls."


	3. In Which An Ofanite Must Confront The Horrors Of Los Angeles Traffic

It's somewhere around five in the afternoon on a Friday, and to my vast surprise, I no longer want to drive. This is because "driving" is a dreadful word to apply to what I'm doing, which is sitting in dead-stopped traffic on a Los Angeles freeway. "We would be making faster time walking," I say.

"Relax," says Jack, and I don't know how he can be so calm, because at this rate we're going to be stuck on this overpass, many yards above anything faintly like ground, for long enough that he and Kelly will start taking dissonance. He smacks the radio a few times, but the current car's radio is having none of it, and refuses to go up in volume any further. "We'll get there soon enough." He leans over with his ear pressed against the speaker, trying to make out the traffic report.

I've missed more than a week of classes back at the community center. The instructor sounds peeved when I call in about how this "family emergency" is taking longer than expected to resolve. "I bet that if we got the ropes out of the trunk, and tied them to the car, we could all climb down to the next underpass--overpass--well, the next level of freeway beneath us, and make a break for freedom."

Mannie sighs irritably in the back seat, and shifts around. "This is starting to sound like a plausible idea. And better than the one about making hang-gliders from the seat covers and sun shield."

"Hey, that wasn't a half bad idea," I say, but Jack's gesturing at me to stay quiet, so I wait a few minutes for him to get what information he can. Now, if the ropes aren't long enough, we could add some length to them with the jumper cables, seat covers, and Mannie's jacket. I'd try to construct it in my head with Jack's jacket included, but he's too fond of that thing to make it worth taking it away. Kelly always has wire on her, some of it might be strong enough to hold a person's weight...

"Aha!" Jack sits back up, and rubs at his ear. "There's a major accident in front of us. This whole place is _locked_. We're going to be stuck here for hours." He pulls a deck of cards out of his jacket's pocket. "Anyone up for a game of poker?"

"It wouldn't be much of a game," says Kelly. She's been staring at the car in front of us fixedly for several minutes now, and I suspect someone in that car has been dreadfully dishonorable. "Given that Mannie has no money, Kai has no poker face, and you cheat."

"You say this like you _don't_ cheat at cards."

Kelly considers this for a moment. "No," she says, "it's just that I'm better at it than you are."

"Movement!" The car ahead of me is inching forward, and I turn on the car again, move forward until I'm nearly touching its bumper. "It's...okay, that wasn't much movement." I turn off the engine. "By the time they clear the accident off the road, it's going to be too late to get to that party. We're going to miss him again. If he's even there." It's the third rumor we've followed to find the Boss, and I'm starting to get disappointed. After a while, hoping so hard and then getting nothing out of it hurts. I was better off back in my apartment hoping the phone would ring and it would be him on the other end.

"Fuck this," says Mannie, and he opens the door to his car. We've all been avoiding saying the V-word, so I stopped using the child locks. He steps out onto the freeway and stretches, runs a hand through his hair. "This is getting us nowhere. Let's go get another car. One that's not stuck in the middle of traffic."

"Sounds like a plan!" Jack's out of the car now, so I look at Kelly. She shrugs, and climbs out.

Well, far be it from the Ofanite to wait in the stopped car while everyone else goes somewhere.

It's only a moment of pinging the Symphony for where it thinks we ought to be before I'm trotting along the shoulder of the freeway, past cars full of howling children and glowering drivers. Mannie slouches along behind me, with Kelly and Jack bringing up the rear. They're having a heated discussion about what kind of car they should steal, and from what snatches of it I can catch over the wind and rumbling of traffic below, the debate is mostly "belonging to someone dishonorable" vs. "a really fast one".

I can't decide which side of the argument I should support.

Mannie pulls out a pair of sunglasses and slides them on, glowering at nothing in particular. He moves forward to keep pace next to me, though it puts him halfway into the lane; it's not like we're in any danger of getting hit by a speeding car. "Are you sure," he says in a low voice, "that there isn't a better way to go about this?"

I shrug, and concentrate on getting where it is that the Symphony wants us to go. That is to say, to the nearest safe exit from the freeway. "When the Boss wants to be found, he'll show. In the meantime, following rumors is the best I can do. I can't expect him to come whenever I call. He has things to do."

"I know, but..." Mannie sighs, and turns that talisman around in his hands. He's been playing with it off and on since he picked it up, as if keeping it close to him will bring Eli to him faster. "The longer this takes, the greater chance someone will notice I'm gone and do something about it. You can understand why I'm in a hurry."

"Sure thing," I say, and I can appreciate being in a hurry. From point A to point B is one of those things I live for. But hurrying down the wrong street is worse than stopping at the intersection to figure out which way you ought to turn, even I know that. I may not always remember it at those intersections, but I know it. "Everything happens in its own proper time and place, and the Boss _knows_ how time and place work. When you're supposed to meet him, you will." And because Mannie doesn't seem to be taking any comfort from this, I add, "Besides, you're moving all over the place. Even if someone finds out you're gone, they won't know where to start looking."

"They have ways." He's gone grumpy again. If he were a child in one of my ballet classes, I'd have ways of cheering him up, but my repertoire of happiness-inducing techniques is pretty low when it comes to demons older than I am with legitimate reasons to worry. So I do my best, which is to grin at him, and ask what kind of car he thinks Jack and Kelly should steal, until he's lecturing me on the rollover statistics of SUVs.

It takes us half an hour to get within sight of a freeway exit. I could have done it in ten, but it's a bad idea to ditch the group. I'm not used to working with other angels--and certainly not with a demon--but when I was a reliever racing other kids from place to place, a nice Mercurian sat me down and gave me a few good lectures on playing nice with others. Of course, the lesson that really stuck was from all the horror movies I watched late at night on my first Earth-side assignment. Never split up the group, or the monster eats you. I've dealt with enough monsters to keep me satisfied on that end for years.

We're passing a little red sports car that keeps gunning its engine when someone shouts, "Hey, Mannie!" It's one of those monstrous SUV-truck combos, and the woman in the passenger seat has rolled down her window to wave at him.

Mannie freezes for a moment, and then he's wearing a charming smile I haven't seen before. "Hey, babe," he says, and strolls over to the door. "Long time no see." I keep a few steps back, where I can listen in without looking too much like I am. Kelly and Jack have stopped too, and both of them are giving the woman in the truck that sort of look that says they're resonating, though only Jack makes it look natural. "You're looking good. Going to introduce me to your friend?"

"Sure thing, sweetheart." The blonde woman giggles, and pulls over the man in the driver's seat, a geeky-looking type wearing a cowboy hat. "Mannie, this my boyfriend, Ed. Ed, an old friend of mine, Mannie. We interned in the same lab, back during college. Mannie, Ed's in charge of this great new startup, he'll have to tell you _all_ about it. We've got to do lunch."

"Sure, babe." Mannie runs a hand through his hair in a move that seems more calculated than necessary. "Give me your card and I'll ring you up some time while I'm in the city?"

"No, let's do it now. Traffic's not going _anywhere_ , the last report said at least two hours before we get to move, maybe more. Ed, honey, let's ditch the car and get something to eat, catch up with my friend. It's not going anywhere while we're gone." Her boyfriend doesn't seem thrilled by this idea, but she's already opening the door to clamber down. "Mannie, it is _so_ good to see you again, just the other day I was saying to myself, 'Gee, I wonder what Mannie's up to these days?' You'll have to tell me all about the latest news back at the office, how the Boss is doing, what his latest projects are. And, hey, these friends of yours?" She gives us a quick, calculating sweep, still smiling.

"Ah," says Mannie, then recovering quickly, "they're acquaintances who are helping me out with a 'project'." He gives her the sort of look that's probably meant to convey we're hapless mortals with no clue what he's talking about. "We can...all do lunch, waiting for the traffic to clear. That's where we were heading."

This is how I find myself in a California Pizza Kitchen in the mall, sitting across the booth from a demon, her boyfriend, and Kelly, between Mannie and Jack. Kelly's been seated next to the demon so that her expression, which could melt steel, can't be seen. She keeps making abortive motions towards the knife under her jacket, but she hasn't attacked anyone else, which is a good sign. It's not like Windys are known for their self-control.

The fluffy blonde, who I'd guess to be an Impudite by the way her boyfriend stares at her and mumbles answers to questions, is apparently named Candi, and just _loves_ Los Angeles, and the restaurant, and the mall, and fluffy puppies and kittens, and her boyfriend, and her current job as personal assistant to him. She orders a salad, which marks her as evil right there; going to a California Pizza Kitchen without ordering the pizza is as close to sacrilegious as one can get with food.

Jack's smile has become fixed, but he's holding up well. I'm feeling trapped, and not just because of the people seated on either side of me. Mannie keeps up a running current of casual conversation, and redirects all of Candi's questions about "the Boss" into something else.

I hope he doesn't bolt for the door. That gets awkward to explain in the middle of lunch. And while I could do something interesting with one of the bread plates, this restaurant is lacking in the impromptu weapons category.

At six they dim the lights in the restaurant for no good reason, and Mannie frowns, and takes his sunglasses off. "My neighbor is breeding cockapoos," Candi prattles, "and they're utterly adorable, I'm on the waiting list for one..." And then there it is, she glances into his eyes, and her face freezes for a moment. "...because they're so fluffy," she says quickly, and she's still going on, but I can see there was something there.

"Hey, Mannie," I say, "scoot out for a minute, I need to hit the restrooms." And once he has, I add, "Did you see them on the way in? I'm not sure where they are, the layout in this place is all weird." He starts to point, and I kick his ankle under the table.

"I'll show you where they are," Mannie says, and slides out from the booth. "Back in just a minute," he says, charming smile for Candi and her table-staring boyfriend.

He walks back between partitions to where the restrooms are located in the back. "Impudite?" I ask quietly, once we're inside the restroom; none of the stall doors are closed, a bit of luck there.

"No, Lilim," he says. "Of...you-know-who."

"Right. Um. Buddy, we have a problem. You got pinged, and I think she got something a little too useful out of it."

Mannie blinks, and twitches, his confident mask melting away. "She's going to go _tell_ him and I'm so fucked they're going to know where I _am_ oh fuck--"

"Hey, hey, calm down." I give him my most reassuring smile. "Three _useful_ people with you, and Kelly would just love to have an excuse to do something. We just need to get the boyfriend out of the way, to avoid complications. If you can drag him off somewhere, believe me, we can drag her off somewhere." At this point the restroom door opens, and Mannie takes his leave while I head over to wash my hands and consider the possibilities.

Dinner is delicious, and I tip my figurative hat to whoever decided that this many types of things can go on a pizza. You wouldn't _think_ that thin-sliced potatoes would work so well, and yet, they do. I'd believe it if I was told the Boss was behind it, or one of his other Servitors. The conversation is inane, as it's mostly Candi babbling and Mannie pretending to listen to her, but that's no reason to ignore good food.

Ed covers dinner with his credit card, the boldest move he's made yet, and perks up when he does so. He seems the sort who's wrapped himself so far up in his company that he can only feel he's doing something when it's an outgrowth of that, and for a moment I wish I could show him how much more he could be. But there's no time for that, and we all stand up now, and Candi turns to smile at each of us and shake hands.

I'll admit it's fun to see her blink as she looks into my eyes. Then again at Jack. And when she shakes hands with Kelly, whose expression has settled into sullen with a faint touch of hope for future mayhem, well, Candi twitches nearly as much as Mannie does when we get too close to talking about Vapula. It's enough to warm an Ofanite's heart. 

"Honey, I need to use the restroom," she says to her boyfriend, and she plants a delicate kiss on the side of his face. "I'll be right back. It was _so_ good seeing you again, Mannie, we have to keep in touch better." She waves a little one hand baby wave, and traipses towards the restrooms.

Kelly follows without bothering to excuse herself, which surprises none of us. Ed mumbles something about women always going to the bathroom in packs, and then stares at me for a moment, as if he's trying to figure out what gender I am. Still male, I think. Last I checked. Must check vessel again when I'm back in the car to make sure.

Jack looks at me, and Mannie looks at me, and I wonder when I started being the one everyone followed. I'm used to everyone trailing behind me when I'm going somewhere, but that's not exactly the same. "Nice meeting you, Ed," I say, and give him a quick handshake, and then head towards the front of the restaurant. I take a quick detour at the first partition to walk as briskly as I can towards the restrooms again.

We all stop at the door. The music playing from the speakers overhead has effectively blocked sounds from inside the restroom, and there haven't been any explosions.

Mannie scratches the back of his head. "Can Kelly handle that one herself?"

"Probably," Jack says, but he frowns. "Unless something tricky goes on, which is possible. Hey, Kai. You can pass for female."

Which means I'm probably male, this vessel. "I'm on it," I say, and step inside.

The women's restrooms are set up so that you have to go around two corners to get inside, and it's all floored in slippery tile. I come around the second corner at a skid to see Kelly with her knife drawn, and the fluffy blonde in a defensive posture, bleeding from one hand. "You bitch," Candi snarls. There's a broken cell phone beneath the sinks behind her, its insides cut open.

"I was wondering what took you so long," Kelly says to me, half a turn to greet me, and in that instant the demon opens her mouth and sings.

There's a vase of dried flowers on the counter, and it's in my hand to throw when Kelly's knife catches me in the chest. "Don't," she snarls, and I drop the vase. It shatters on the floor, dried flowers everywhere. "Don't you _touch_ her."

"Kelly?" I take a step back as she swings again. "What's--" This time the knife catches my arm, and I shout, "Jack!" Move backwards, ever backwards, no wall at my back, and the two of us slam out through the door to the restroom, right into Jack as he opens the door to come in.

Jack pulls me up as I trip on him, still trying to maneuver myself away from Kelly's precise swinging. "What's going on?" he asks, and Candi bursts out the door, runs for the exit of the restaurant. "Holy Hell!" That's at Kelly's jab at him, and he lets go of me, and I pitch forward into Kelly again.

I'm bleeding all over myself now, and wishing I'd thought to pack a change of clothes. Someone behind us is shouting. I think we've passed the exit for Discreet by a few miles at this point, and are cheerfully speeding down the highway of Public Disturbance. I throw myself at Kelly, who's never been very good at knife work once she's grappled. "Go get her," I manage, and Jack's gone, zipping between the gathering onlookers in the restaurant like an eel through water.

Kelly's stronger than I am, and my vessel isn't much heavier than hers. It doesn't help that my hands are slippery with blood. In a moment she's yanked away from me and running for the exit, but she can't get through crowds the way Jack can. Disturbance twinges at my ears as she pushes past a waiter, sending an entire tray of plates crashing to the floor.

Mannie gives me a hand up, and passes me a cloth napkin from one of the tables. "You're bleeding," he says quietly.

"Yes. In lots of places. Big help _you_ were." It's rude of me to snarl, but it hurts, and I've lost the demon, and who knows how long Kelly's going to be running around thinking this damn Vapulan is her New Best Friend who needs protection from all of us big bad angels. Getting stabbed by your friends hurts worse than any damage done in the line of duty.

"Sorry," he says, and another napkin around my arm to stop that wound. "Someone's going to call the authorities soon, if they haven't already," he adds quietly, leaning over me. "We need to get out of here before someone thinks to stop us." He pulls me along between the people in the crowd with quick smiles and vague words about taking me to a hospital and how I should know better than to get involved in a lovers' quarrel, and if people aren't dispersing, they aren't stopping us either.

There's something dreadfully embarrassing about staggering around being supported by a demon. At least Jack's not here to see it; I'd never hear the end of it.

Out in the mall, evening crowds stare at us. "Hemophilia," Mannie says to an elderly woman who's striding up to us with all the confidence of a grandmother who knows how to put things right. "Just a little cut. We're heading off to get it looked at right now." I think he's trying to follow the blood spatters on the floor, from Candi's cut hand and the blood I left on Kelly.

"I should have known that any day involving a traffic jam would be a bad one," I say. At least none of those slices hit my legs; I can stagger along beside Mannie well enough with a bit of help. "But we are in _such_ trouble. This should have been simple. Only one of her..."

"You underestimated her," Mannie says quietly, still smiling reassuringly at the people we pass. "Your type always does. Those who don't fight well find other ways of protecting themselves. Malakim get used to thinking of everything in terms of who can hit hardest and first, but there's more to it than that."

"Like your fire," I say, and stumble on something. Embarrassing, dreadfully embarrassing, I'm so glad none of my students can see me now. I'm supposed to be light on my feet, every step in the right place. "That's your way of protecting yourself?"

"Among others. You'd be surprised by what some people Need..." He looks around, and frowns. "We're not going to catch up with them, not with you like this. Let's find someplace private."

"Sure thing," I say, because that, at least, is something I can do. I lead the way to where a long hallway takes a sharp right for phones and restrooms, then another right towards a Staff Only door. "Here," I say, and lean back against the wall. "She's good with that knife, you know. Got to give her credit there. Big ol' knife that it is."

"A kukri," Mannie says. "Hold still." He whistles out a familiar tune, and my cuts seal themselves up. "Better. But you're covered in blood." He opens up my bag; he's been carrying it since the restaurant, and I hadn't even noticed. Probably should have left it in the car, all things considered. He passes me a fresh pair of socks, eyes the piccolo, puts it back in. "You didn't pack for a long trip. What size do you wear?"

I check the tag on my pants, and find it covered in blood. "I have _no_ idea."

"I'll guess, then. Wait here."

He's a few minutes gone and I have a clean pair of socks on before I realize that there's something odd about this whole situation. I'll blame the traffic. It's a good thing to blame. There's probably a Demon of Traffic Jams out there somewhere, and if I ever meet him, I'm going to personally decapitate him. With something creative and ironic.

Mannie is apparently serious enough about this redemption thing. Before I've done more than doodle a few new dance steps on the wall with the damper bits of my shirts, he's back with new clothes. I adjourn to the restroom to wash my face and hands, and put on the new clothing. The jeans are tighter than I'd like, and more expensive than I'd buy for my starving-assistant-ballet-instructor Role. I step out of the restroom looking presentable, and advertising some vacuous mass-produced clothing brand on my chest. "I feel like a yuppie," I say. "Let's go find them."

"You're far too scruffy to be a yuppie," Mannie says, and leads the way back to where we saw the blood spots. The trail's been washed away by industrious mall workers with mops, but there are plenty of people who can tell a concerned boyfriend where his girlfriend ran out of the mall chasing his ex-girlfriend and pursued by the ex's current boyfriend. It's an impressively laid story, complete with dramatic acting on his part. He should be on stage, and I have to take back what I said about him not having the presence to play a King Lear. He could act every part in a play if he set his mind to it. I'm not sure if I should be pleased or worried by how much more in control he is now. At least he still seems determined to follow his original plan.

Outside the mall the trail is still there, as are two police cars. We step around the cars and stroll down the sidewalk, two friends who happen to be coming from the mall and following the trail of the blood spots. "She's going to call in someone," Mannie says. His shoulders hunch. "I'm not sure who. Probably not the Game, but... I don't know. Maybe local friends, maybe even, ah, you know who. If she hadn't noticed Kelly she might have tried to geas me by letting me go without telling anyone. Now I don't know."

"She won't if Jack and Kelly--" I shake my head. "I keep forgetting she hit Kelly with that Song. That complicates matters. I _hate_ those sorts of Songs." I've never liked the idea of messing with people's minds, twisting how they think. It's way too Shedite for my taste, even if angels can use those same Songs for good. It makes my fingers itch to even think about having it happen to me. "We need to catch up with them. Jack might be able to take Kelly on his own, but not the both of them, especially if Candi can do that again."

Mannie shrugs. "She probably blew most of her Essence to make sure it worked. So it depends on whether or not she's had time to stop and get Kelly's Essence too." He glances around us as we reach an exit of the mall's parking garage, and shudders. "I hate this city. We need to get out of here soon."

"Agreed. But we need to find Kelly and Jack first."

"I'm not so sure about that," and now he's looking at me as if he expects me to save him somehow, which is not an idea I'd like to have building in his head. I've done my fair share of jobs, and I'd like to think that I'm generally competent, but a rescuer of wayward demons I am not.

"Let me put it this way," I say. "Do you have the keys to the car?"

"No..."

"Do you know how to steal a car?"

"...no."

"Do you want to try to escape via bus? In Los Angeles?"

"Point made. We'll find them first."

By now my feet want to go charging down the street as fast as I can take them, but I settle for a brisk walk, unlikely to draw attention. Well, unlikely to draw much attention; there aren't many people on the sidewalks in this city. I'm not sure why they bother with sidewalks, given the non-existent pedestrian traffic.

The blood drops have dried up, and there aren't enough people outside to ask if they've seen anyone run past. "Any idea where she'd run?" I ask. Mannie shakes his head, and frowns. "Right, then. Kelly's going to be trying to protect her, right?"

"That's how it works, yes."

"So by the time Kelly caught up with her, she'd be dragging the demon off somewhere _Kelly_ thought was a good defensible position." I don't like the idea that I'm the person in charge of tactics. I'm more comfortable letting myself be pointed in a direction to run, and hitting things as they present themselves for the hitting. I take my piccolo out of my bag, and consider what I know of how Kelly would think.

So, there's a street outside a mall, and she's looking for a place where she can take on Jack, who's taller than her and pretty angry at this point. He's also not the sort to feel bad about smacking a friend if said friend needs smacking, so she can't count on any hesitation. She's trying to protect someone she thinks is utterly helpless, so...narrow spaces. Places where she can stand in the way while Candi runs for a phone, dammit, but please let it be a phone and not an attempt to call up Vapula. We may be able to outrun other demons, but there's no way we're going to outrun a Demon Prince.

"This way." I take off at a run, trusting Mannie to follow behind. It's too late to worry about not splitting up, and this doesn't seem like a horror movie. He's proven himself reliable, right? It's not like he ditched me when he had the chance, even if he must be ready to bolt anywhere to get out of this situation.

Around a shoe store, past a run-down video arcade, and back there, an alleyway running from one street to another, full of junk. Perfect. 

And, of course, correct. Jack's still standing, though he's bleeding worse than I was; I think his Superior gives him tougher vessels than I get, on account of believing he'd need the resistance more often. Kelly's standing in the center of the alley, knife in hand, as dangerous-looking as I've ever seen her. A bruise on her cheek suggests Jack's gotten one swing in, but she's winning.

"I don't want to hurt you," she says, "but I can't let you go any further." The demon's not even in sight. Just our luck.

"Hey, Kelly," I say, and light on my feet, my run turns into a spin as she swings at me, now that I'm expecting it from her. Try not to think about it being her, and remember that Malakim aren't so bothered by a bit of corporeal death.

My Boss gave me a few talents. I try to make good use of them. The piccolo slams through her chest harder than something made for music ought to.

"Sorry," I say, and she crumples down in front of me, eyes wide. I know she's used to it, I know she's been here before, and when she's back to being herself she'll thank me for it, but, damn it. Damn the infernal thing that made me do this, and if it's already damned, well, kill it. I want it dead.

"She'll understand," Jack says, wiping blood out of his eyes. He crouches down and begins going through her pockets, takes her knife. To give it back to her later. Of course. "The Boss will get her head back on straight, and give her a talking-to for getting into this situation, and then she'll back." Mannie's caught up to us now, and Jack packs all of Kelly's wires and explosives into my bag. "We should get moving. I'll call one of our Tethers from our next stop so that she'll know where to meet us."

"I'm surprised she isn't back already," Mannie says, with a nervous look around that says he's wondering if she's going to be at us with another knife.

"That was her backup vessel," Jack says. "She'll have to ask our Boss for a new one, and he won't send her back until she's thinking straight. But I don't know how long that'll be."

"We need to keep moving before the police show up," Mannie says. "This isn't a city where I want to talk my way out of a murder case. I don't know who's going to show up once she has a chance to call..." He twitches. "Let's go _now_."

"Come on," Jack says. Hand on my shoulder. "You're supposed to be the practical one, remember?"

"We can't let her just _go_ like that," I say. I want to hurt that demon in a way I haven't wanted to hurt anyone in a while. I've gotten into my fair share of fights, but it's usually just fun and games, business. Nothing personal. They've done something wrong, they refuse to stop, I get to convince them of the error of their ways. Part of my job. This makes me want to be unreasonable, impractical. I want to set something on fire. I want to set _someone_ on fire. I want to drop this vessel and do something unpleasant where it really _counts_.

"Hey," Jack says, gives me a shake. "Snap out of it, Kai. You're not doing her any good if we sit here and get arrested. Now grab your flute and let's find a car."

"It's a piccolo," I say. I don't know how I'm ever going to get the blood out properly.

Half an hour later we're in a sporty little sedan with an unnecessary spoiler, heading north. Jack's driving, with Mannie in the front seat, and I sit in the back trying to work the blood out of my piccolo with my last pair of clean socks, which are no longer clean. I wish Mannie had thought to pick up a pair for me. "Hey, Mannie," I say. "I thought you were broke. How did you get these clothes for me?"

"I stole someone's wallet," Mannie says, and shifts in his seat when Jack and I both stare at him. "It's good to have a few skills that aren't directly relevant to work."

"I could get to _really_ like you," Jack says. He's grinning like nothing happened, and I guess in a way nothing much did happen. We got out more or less safely, and if someone was going to get killed, Kelly's the one who will bounce back fastest.

I still think the Boss would be disappointed in me. I mean, he'd be nice about it, because he always is, but I should have come up with a better plan, figured things out faster, hit Kelly the first time in the restroom before that demon could get away. Or followed faster so I could have helped Jack in the chase. Something. I wish I were back at home with my phone and bagpipes and ballet classes and fighting with the board of directors for funding. Doing what I know how to do. Doing what I'm supposed to be doing, instead of running around with a demon who can't figure out if he wants to redeem he should just go to a Tether like everyone else. If the Boss wanted me to find him, he'd be showing up. I'm doing everything all wrong.

We stop at a gas station to refuel, and Jack calls some friend of his to pass on word to a Tether of Wind that we'll be passing near it soon. Mannie gets coffee for everyone, and he brings four cups back to the car, stares at them for a moment, hands me two of them.

I drink both, and wait by the pay phone for a few minutes while Jack works out which credit card to use inside. And then Jack's back outside and it's time to keep driving. The phone doesn't ring. The Boss never calls, these days.


	4. An Intermission With Judgement

Adala had arranged their schedule such that they were to check on Kai at three in the afternoon, which allowed time between his classes but in no way approached a meal time closely enough to give him an excuse to try to cook. Adala was somewhat proud of this, as everyone in her triad could remember what happened the last time they'd arrived late and visited at dinner time. Nomikos, Malakite of Judgment and a true sword of justice, had passed on his quiet thanks when she told them about this, as he was the one who'd had to put out the kitchen on that occasion. It was somewhat beneath his dignity to wield a fire extinguisher, though he did note that it was responsible of Kai to have one so close at hand.

At precisely three o'clock Adala knocked on the door. She waited a minute for an answer, then knocked again. Still no answer. She frowned. Kai was not the sort to have a wild social life that kept him away from home, but it was possible that he'd forgotten about the appointment and was completing some Role-appropriate errand. The door proved to be unlocked, which was worrisome. "We will wait inside until he returns, or a better course of action presents itself," she said, and led her fellows into the apartment.

The main room was a mess. It was always a mess, though Kai usually spent half the duration of their visits darting about trying to clean up. The computer was on, suggesting a return in short order. Dedan checked the kitchen and reported that nothing was cooking, which brought a small, quiet sigh of relief from all of them.

After fifteen minutes with no sign of Kai, Dedan suggested to the Most Holy that they inquire elsewhere to his whereabouts, as too much delay would cause their schedule to deviate from its planned course. This was agreed upon as a prudent course of action, and so Dedan phoned the instructor Kai worked with to inquire if a class might be going late.

The news that Kai had been gone on a family emergency for over a week was not taken well. "He must have done something wrong," Nomikos declared, in the unhappy tone of someone who does not like what he has been forced to say.

"Nonsense," Dedan replied, untangling the mass of knots that Kai's phone cord had been twisted into. "He's a responsible sort, and not the kind to run off for no good reason. He's always been cooperative, and eager to help us in any way he could."

"True," said Adala. She considered the matter for a moment, as Nomikos began to pace the floor. "It seems most likely that he was called away by someone else. He didn't let us know he wouldn't be here, so it's also likely that he didn't realize he would be gone for so long."

"He does have a friend who works for Wind," Dedan pointed out, and he frowned. "This friend stops by at irregular intervals as a sort of roommate, if you recall from our previous discussions. An extended absence might be connected to this Wind Servitor."

They considered this, and agreed that this was a likely cause of Kai's departure from his accustomed routine. "It's quite a Windy sort of thing to do," Nomikos said. "It would be like them to pull him out of his assigned tasks to accompany them on some illegal enterprise."

"But Kai isn't the sort to carelessly break the law," Dedan pointed out. Adala could only concur with this statement, as Kai had proven himself to be quite law-abiding except on those situations where it would interfere with a virtuous task he had been assigned, for the cause of Heaven.

"He might if he were convinced that their enterprise was meant for some greater good that outweighed the deeds necessary to complete it," said Nomikos. "And while we all agree that Kai is a well-meaning sort, he is perhaps too easily swayed by the arguments of his friends."

"He's fallen under bad influences," Dedan said.

"Led astray from his careful dedication to duty," Nomikos said.

"Corrupted by the Windies who are, if suited in their own way to their place in the Symphony and God's work, not the most advisable of companions for an impressionable young Servitor of Eli who, without an Archangel to guide his steps, finds himself swayed by the words of those who would not take proper care to ensure he doesn't fall into temptations he isn't prepared to deal with," Dedan said.

Adala thought over their words while they waited on her decision. It took a moment to unpack that sentence. "Guardian, you show admirable concern for the wellbeing of this Wheel," she said. "Virtue, you would know well how one's duty may become obscured without careful attention. We must report this to the Most Just."

All agreed to this course of action. Adala added the resolution to her weekly report, and scheduled an interim report of the incident with a request for instructions for her next available time slot. Dedan saved all of the open documents on the computer and shut it down to conserve electricity, and Nomikos, with what might have been called by the crude a nervous air, double-checked the fire extinguisher in the kitchen to make sure it wasn't in need of inspection. At this point they left, on time to reach their next appointment promptly.


	5. In Which Transportation Difficulties Arise

Driving through San Francisco is a blast, especially at night. Up the hill! Down the hill! Up the hill! Down the hill! I may have run a few red lights, but it never seems to be a problem for Kelly or Jack, so I'm not too worried about it, though the triad might be stern about the matter when I next see them.

"Oh, man. I completely forgot." I run a red light without even thinking about it until I'm through, and nearly take the fender off a taxi who was too eager on the green. "They're going to be so worried. I've got to call them as soon as we get to the Tether."

"Call who?" Jack opens his eyes from where he's been daydreaming of whatever it is that occupies his mind.

"My triad. They come by the second Friday of every month to see how I'm doing, and that was yesterday. I didn't leave a note or anything. Never thought I'd be gone this long. I've got to call and let them know I'm okay, or they'll be wondering."

"Don't! They'll ask questions, and then you'll _answer_ questions, and it all goes to Hell from there." That's Mannie, and I think he means the part about going to Hell literally. I wonder if he's one of those demons who thinks that Judgment and the Game are in on everything, and that triads turn Renegades over to the Game for punishment, but I can't think of a way to ask him without being rude. "Look, just... You can get back to them about it later, right? After we've found Eli?"

"They won't mind waiting a while to catch up with you," Jack says lazily. A sure sign that he never thought of fledging Seraph, because it can't be that he's never met a triad. He may not have met mine, but I'm sure none of them are happy about letting something like this slide with no notice. "If you're really worried, we'll drop a note with the caretaker at the Tether, and they can pass it on in a few days. Then when we're finished here you can give them the full story. No harm done."

"But... I was going to make them brownies. I had it all planned out. And I completely forgot."

"Kai, you can't make _toast_ without setting the toaster on fire."

"Exactly. But toast is boring. It's just scorched bread. So I was thinking, hey, brownies are creative. They make something interesting and new from boring ingredients. I thought if I tried those, maybe I'd be, you know, more in tune with the Word I serve, and it would work better. In a less flammable manner."

Jack grins at me. "Kai, I think they'll forgive you for not having brownies. And they'll understand once you explain. So stop worrying about it, okay?"

"I'm going to agree with Jack on this one," Mannie says. Much as I know he's biased due to an unreasonable fear of Judgment (which is made up nice, understanding, fair people, if a bit on the strict side), I can't help but agree with both of them. Besides, I'm not in the mood to try to explain that nasty little blotch of dissonance I picked up. It's my fault, but I think there were extenuating circumstances, all things considered. So if I meet up with the Boss first, I can explain it to him and apologize for screwing up, and he'll tell me how to make it right. That way, when I go talk to the triad, it'll be sorted out and they won't have to worry about it.

So I'm doing them a favor in not bothering them about it. They'll understand when I explain everything in the end. They're nice guys, though Nomikos is weirdly twitchy for a Malakite; I can't even offer him coffee when they're stopping by without him jumping around. Maybe he doesn't like caffeine, and isn't sure how to turn it down politely? I'll have to find out the next time they're by, or start offering decaf. Virtues can be funny about etiquette sometimes, and Judgment ones even more so.

I idle by City Hall while Jack runs off to find Kelly and leave my message with the caretaker. Neither Mannie nor I wants to walk into a Tether right now, for our own reasons.

"I always thought it was inefficient," Mannie says, while we wait, "to not bother stabilizing Tethers. You'd think Janus would want more of them around. Strategic value and so forth. He's one of the more warlike Archangels, isn't he?"

"I think it wouldn't fit well with his nature, though," I say, and shrug. I've never paid much attention to the policies of other Archangels except to make sure I can be polite to their Servitors. After all, they have their own Words to maintain. "Too static."

"Word nature over practicality. It would make sense." Mannie leans forward from the back seat and begins flipping through the contents of the glove box. This is the second car since Los Angeles, and we haven't had a chance to explore its full potential, though I did find out how fast I could make it go before the engine started whimpering.

"Have you given Words any thought?" I ask him, as he goes through registration, junk mail, an actual glove in the glove box (which is the first time I've ever seen one in that space), pens without caps and pencils with the lead broken off. "I mean, what you'd like to do once you've redeemed. You've spent plenty of time with two different types of Servitors, but I'm sure they'll want you to meet everyone before making a decision."

"I hadn't thought that far ahead," Mannie says. He's been quiet since I killed--since Kelly's vessel got killed, and thoughtful, and he keeps giving both me and Jack these odd looks when he doesn't think I can see. You can see a lot with a rearview mirror tilted the right way. It's not like I need to know what's behind the car, after all. I'm going forward; the people behind me can take care of themselves. "It's been... Well. Mostly a matter of finding the artifact and getting it to Eli. After that, things aren't under my control anymore." He smiles, a small sad smile. "Not that they're much under my control right now, either. But, no, I hadn't thought any further than that. After all, the redemption is so...uncertain." He snaps the glove box closed and sits back.

"I don't know why Falling should be so much easier than redemption." I shift in my seat, and want to be moving again. You'd think that a Windy could get a simple message passed on a faster than this. "It doesn't seem fair. But I'm sure you'll be fine."

"It makes perfect sense," Mannie says. "It's basic thermodynamics. Loss is always easier than gain. Breaking things is easier than putting them together. You could call it another example of entropy, if you wanted. It's a grand metaphor, fighting entropy or trying to ride it downhill..."

Listening to a Vapulan is an exercise in brain-hurting, even a former one. "So the whole Symphony is...physics?"

"Or physics is a manifestation of the Symphony. Whichever way you'd like to interpret it." He touches the pocket where he's keeping that awful little talisman. It's pretty enough, and I'll grant that there's some real art in how it curves, but something to help with sorcery is just _wrong_ , no two ways about it. It can't possibly be anything my Boss made, no matter what Mannie claims.

Jack dashes back to the car, and drops into the shotgun seat. "Don't say anything about it," he tells us quickly, but I'm already boggling at the little old lady stomping towards us, an all-too-familiar expression on her face.

"Kelly?"

"Not a _word_ ," she says, and slouches down into the seat next to Mannie. She's even carrying a bag. Of yarn. I almost ask her if she'd mind loaning it to me so that I can try to work out how to knit by studying a sweater, but I decide that she wouldn't take the request well.

"So," Jack says, as I pull away from the curb, "was he trying to teach you a lesson, or was that the only vessel he had immediately handy?"

"I do _not_ want to talk about it." Kelly shifts in her seat, and glares balefully at all of us. "Did you at least catch that..." She searches for a sufficiently acidic word for the demon who was twisting her mind. 

"No," I say. It doesn't hurt as much to tell her as I'd expected. "We had to run in case she got to a phone already, or summoned Va--ah, you-know-who."

There's a small squeak in the back, and a thump, when Kelly tackles Mannie as he's going for the door. That should raise her mood. "In any case," I say, "we didn't get a chance, much as we would all _love_ to meet up with her and explain that doing that isn't nice. I'm sorry about that. Maybe the next time we're through the city..."

"Don't worry about it," Kelly says, though her voice implies she's going to find a way to worry about it later, or make someone else worry about it a great deal. "So where's our next stop?"

"Seattle's holding a Shakespeare festival," I say. "They're doing a bunch of his minor plays, and there's a decent chance--well, there's at least a rumor that the Boss might be showing up there. Everyone loves _Cymbeline_ , right? Especially the bit with Zeus descending from the sky on the back of a golden eagle, though they cut that out of a lot of productions for time, budget, and plausibility reasons. Which is something of a pity, because it's a great scene, and actually thematically relevant to the whole thing."

There's a pause while the three of them look at me. It annoys me. Haven't they ever seen Shakespeare? I'll grant that _Cymbeline_ isn't one of his best-known plays, but all the more reason to grab any chance to see it.

If I weren't riding around with a Renegade demon in the back seat, my triad uninformed of my whereabouts, and my classes left without my help in teaching... I could be enjoying this trip. Hitting every place people say Eli might be showing up is the best way to tour the country, aside from that one raver party we hit that was, quite frankly, not all that creative as those things go.

Six hours later we're just coming up on Salem when Mannie looks up from the map he found under the seat. "Kai? We're going to need to detour around Portland."

"Around Portland?" I review the map in my head; I may not be always up to speed on local politics or the like, but geography is one subject I know forwards, backwards, and in three dimensions. "You want to get to Seattle without--why? I mean, we can do it, but... how far do you want us to skirt it by?"

"As far as possible," Mannie says, and he scratches the back of his head, not quite meeting my eyes in the rearview mirror. "You can just...go around it, right?"

"Have you looked at the way the interstates are--no, no, it's fine, I can go around Portland. But you realize, this is likely to make us late to the first performance." I'm already running through the changes in my head. I'll have to hit I-85 and travel east for a while, and depending on how far he wants to go around Portland, the fastest bet would be taking the turnoff we passed ten minutes ago. I slam on the brakes, back up to the exit I just passed, and swing a fast turn around back onto the highway in the other direction. "One trip to Seattle minus Portland, coming right up."

"Nice turn," Jack says, and I can tell he wishes he was driving. Maybe at the next gas stop I can let him--but no, I don't want to stop moving. Ninety miles an hour for as long as I can keep it up, every exit the right one to take, every road the best one to go where I want to go, and maybe I can burn rubber for long enough to be doing my job properly again.

Kelly mutters something as she tries to rearrange herself on the seat from where the turn flung her about. The vessel she's been given is awfully aerodynamic for a Windy, and I'd offer to give it a few years' boost in a younger direction, but I don't know if she'd take the suggestion kindly. "This would be much easier if you were willing to talk to our Boss," Kelly says disapprovingly, and she has reason to be grumpy about how long this is all taking. Windies don't really do long-term projects.

Mannie shrugs. "I'm sure he's an excellent Superior, but he's a bit too...warlike, for my comfort level."

"But it's not like Eli is all fluffy bunnies and happy people holding hands," Jack says, with a dazzling white grin at me. "So why him?"

"I knew a--I knew someone once who told me the Archangel of Creation had helped form the world," Mannie says. "If anyone can get me through this, it would be someone who could do that. Who understands putting things together, not just taking them apart." He stares at the window, and smiles. "Besides, if I want to get the real story on what Judgment does to people like me, talking to someone who's on Dominic's hit list is a good way to hear the truth of the matter."

"I wish people would stop passing that story around." I run another red light, and take a moment to wonder if the Windys are a bad influence. I'll have to ask my triad the next time they catch up to me. "It's entirely wrong. The Boss needed to do something big, and knew he was going to be gone for a while, so of course he asked Dominic to keep an eye on all of his Servitors while he was gone, to make sure no one screwed up just because their Archangel wasn't around to see it."

"I see," Mannie says. "But then why do the angels of Judgment keep asking everyone if they've seen Eli?"

"It's not like the Boss can drop by Heaven to say hello, not with his big plan and all that. This is a good way for Dominic to keep track of where the Boss is going and how the plan is working, without letting on about any of the details." I keep having to explain this to people; I don't know why it's so hard for them to grasp. It's not like it's that complicated of a plan.

"I see," Mannie says, and in the rearview mirror I can see him staring at the back of my head for a bit. "Never let it be said that you're not creative, Kai."

"Thanks!"

The interstate isn't half as much fun as San Francisco was, even if I can keep a higher speed, and it's nearly enough to have me cranking on the cruise control. Not that I'd take that easy way out, not when it's much more a test of skill to hit the gas and brake just right, and zip in and out and between cars that aren't moving as fast as they ought. Back roads, now, those are halfway between dull as dirt for the lack of traffic and entertaining for the obstacles they contain.

It's just when I'm rounding a curve on an incline that a front tire decides to blow in the jostle of a pothole, and the world spins in a way I'm not used to seeing it spinning, at least not when I'm vessel-bound and inside a car. Kelly shouts something I can't quite hear, Jack's hitting the windshield, and I'm just coherent enough to be thankful I was responsible and wore my seatbelt when the whole mass of metal crashes down onto the pavement again, and,

spin

slide

ow.

When I open my eyes again, Mannie is shaking his head at me. "I thought Ofanim were supposed to be good drivers."

"Fast," I say, "fast drivers. Good is optional." There's a hand to help me to my feet, and it's trembling. "You okay?"

"Whatever your Role may be, I don't think it covers totaling a car, several fence posts, and the remains of what I think was some sort of, ah, shack." I do seem to be sitting in the middle of broken planks on the edge of the field we'd been passing, and sure enough, the car's propped neatly on its side, smoking, a fence post embedded into it. "I try to be careful, and the last time I made that much disturbance there was an entire laboratory going up in flames."

"We're in the middle of nowhere. Who's going to hear it?" I shake my head to get rid of the lingering urge to roll instead of walk. "Hey, cool, so that's what the underside of a car looks like!"

"...you've never looked?"

"I drive them, not fix them." And there's Jack glowering at the long, bloody tear in his jacket. It doesn't match him anymore, which is a pity, because having a friend who's invisible in the dark if he remembers not to smile is handy. He could get the same effect if he went naked, but for some reason Servitors of other Superiors don't have the same attitude towards nudity that Creationers do. "Hey, where's Kelly?"

"Through the windshield," Jack says, and gestures at a lump not far from the car. "The Boss is going to be annoyed at this point. But, hey," he says quickly, I'm sure my face is already showing the way I feel, "don't stress it. Malakim, weebles, same difference."

"Weebles?" Mannie asks. He's wrapped his arms around himself despite the heat of the day, and his hands are still shaking.

"You know. 'Weebles wobble, but they don't fall down!' It's... never mind." Jack eyes Kelly's vessel. "She is having the worst luck this trip. If I didn't know better, I'd think someone had it in for her, not Mannie."

Mannie's not paying attention to the body, not with a car to inspect. He puts one hand against the hood and shoves, but it's not settling back down without more force than that. "Middle of nowhere... Do either of you have a cell phone?"

"Too traceable," Jack says, at the same time as I say, "What's the point?"

"No way to call a mechanic. We're in the middle of nowhere. We just let loose a massive burst of disturbance. And, ah, we wouldn't want to miss the first act of _Cymbeline_." Mannie shakes his head. "I sometimes think I should have--but no matter. Jack, Kai, would you be so kind as to give me a hand in righting the car?"

It's easy enough to shove it back onto its tires--well, three tires and one rim--and Mannie yanks the hood open, frowning. "I have absolutely _no_ tools here, but I'll have to manage. Kai, would you check the trunk for any sort of toolkit or items you might, ah, creatively make into tools? Jack, if you'd watch the road for cars, it would be faster to take another one than fix this if the opportunity presents itself..."

"I'm a Windy, not a Thief," Jack says indignantly. "I don't just steal _any_ car I happen to come across."

Mannie looks up, and his eyes refocus from wherever they'd been staring, as if he were watching someone a great distance behind Jack. "Quite right," he says, and I can see his hands aren't shaking any more. "I apologize for implying otherwise. You must forgive my bad habits. I am attempting to correct them."

There's a tool kit in the trunk, geared more towards home repair than car repair, I think, but it seems serviceable enough. I haul it up to Mannie and drop it on the ground next to him. "You know, I bet I could put together a spiffy little go-cart sort of thing using the three wheels, some of those fence poles, and the car's engine."

"Thank you," Mannie says, "but that won't be necessary." He pokes delicately through the bit of the car that was smashed by the poles, pliers in one hand, with the precision of a doctor doing exploratory surgery.

After a few minutes it becomes clear he doesn't want help from either of us, so Jack and I head further down the line of fence, him slouching along beside it while I do cartwheels along the rails. "I like him more when he's nervous than when he's confident," Jack says quietly. "This is taking longer than I expected."

"Well," I say, dropping down from a handstand to sit on the fence, "it's not like the Boss makes himself easy to find, these days." It doesn't even hurt to say this anymore. The Boss has big plans, so big there's no way I can help, except by staying out of his way and doing my job. "It's good that Mannie's getting over the twitchiness, right?"

"Maybe," Jack says, and refuses to elaborate, so I spend a few minutes weaving little squares out of the reeds that grow by the fenceposts, and then try to figure out how to alternate them properly to work in more complex designs. I wish I had my bagpipes with me; this open field is crying out for a good bit of squawking, and I could use the practice. I'll be rusty at it by the time I get back home.

Squares become rectangles, ovals, jaunty patterns worked into the reeds with bits of grass and twigs from the tree we sat beneath. "I need to call the director again when we get to the next gas station," I say. I've missed more than a week of classes, an entire week of kids wondering where their favorite instructor is, of learning the wrong steps and imprecise moves because the official teacher doesn't pay close attention. But surely the Boss knows all this, and he'll be waiting at the festival we're almost at, he'll be there waiting, and take care of Mannie, and I can hitch a ride home from Jack, and it'll all be fine. Really.

"You can say your ailing relative passed away and you need to stay for the funeral," Jack suggests, on his back with a blade of grass in his mouth, staring at the tree above us. It's a lovely tree, fluffy and rough by turns, with a light carpet of leaves and grass to keep the dirt from being too rough beneath us. I wish I could paint the way the tree feels, and if it were a little more sturdy I'd already be climbing up to the top branches. "I mean, it's close enough to the truth, with the way you keep--um."

"Killing Kelly's vessels?" I sigh and toss away the swatch I'm working on, a tight-knit star made of reeds and grass. I'm running out of reeds in my immediate vicinity anyway. "You know, until I started this trip, I'd never toasted any vessel that didn't belong to a demon who was actively trying to fight back. And now I've managed to take out a Malakite _twice_. Once on purpose. This strikes me as a lack of progress on my part. My triad is going to be _so_ disappointed in me."

"They're Judgment. Are they ever not disappointed in people?" Jack has the opinion, as do most of his fellow Servitors, that all the triads are just big meanies out to spoil the fun and whimsy of Windies and Creationers. It's one of the reasons I could never work for his Boss, not even on a temporary basis. 

I'm not about to argue Heavenly politics with a friend, not when we're dealing with delays and stress. So I make a noncommittal noise, and run my hands through the grass. Novalis, now, there's an Archangel whose policies I could get behind, if only she weren't so picky about violence. There's nothing wrong with properly applied violence, and, hey, it's fun. Even with Jack losing half an arm that time, there was a certain thrill to beating down that hideous thing in the basement of the dead town.

Mannie walks over to us, wiping his hands clean on a black handkerchief. "The car is," he says, and hesitates, "I wouldn't call it fixed--if any of my assistants had ever called something this poorly repaired _fixed_ I would have been annoyed--but it will function for a dozen miles. Maybe two dozen. I trust you can find us the nearest gas station, Kai?"

"Like you have to ask?" I jump to my feet, and I'm halfway back to the car before Jack's even sat up. "I'll keep it under 80 the whole way there. Come on, if we hurry we can still make it in time for the descent of Zeus."

"Wouldn't want to lose sight of the important goals of this trip," Jack says. He examines the car before gingerly returning to the battered shotgun seat. "Mannie, how did you get out of the wreck sufficiently in one piece to be able to sing the rest of us back to health?" The whole back window is broken, I think where one of the fence posts went through it, and there's a large hole in the windshield where Kelly went through. I'm not looking at that lump, though I do have to wonder at what the person who finds it is going to think, a sweet little old lady in the middle of a field.

"I snapped celestial when the car started to flip," Mannie says, and he stretches his legs out in the back seat now that he's not sharing it with anyone. "It seemed worth the Essence spent to ensure that the one person with the Song of Healing wasn't taken out." His hand touches the pocket where the artifact is kept, and I remember that if his vessel were killed, he'd end up in Limbo, trying to gather enough Essence together to make another one and come back. All alone in the gray with nothing but yourself to talk to, no way to move anywhere, nothing to see... I shudder, and start the car.

It makes strange sounds as I drive, and refuses to go above 30 miles per hour, but it does move. Driving with half the windshield gone is strange, but, hey, Creationer. I can adapt. Frazzled as my nerves have started to become, I can still find a gas station in a two-story town that could use a more exciting color scheme. Mannie heads inside to negotiate with the coffee machine while Jack argues repair prices with the mechanic shop that huddles up by the convenience store.

I find a pay phone, and dig out the last of my coins. Usually I save quarters for doing laundry, but you can't have everything.

Flora, the nice but inattentive secretary who works for the director of the board, patches me through right away. They must be getting worried. "Hey," I say, "it's Kai. It's...um, taking me longer than expected. I really am sorry to be gone for this long."

"Kai," says the director, in that smooth voice he uses on parents balking at prices, donors unconvinced about how much to contribute, people who would argue with his teacher appointments. "We've been getting worried about you here. You know, little Sally Fieldman broke down in tears in the middle of class and wouldn't continue because you weren't there."

"Aw, man..." Sally's parents are in the middle of a nasty custody dispute, and so far as I know, it's only through the sorts of tantrums a dedicated eight year old can throw that she's managed to keep up the ballet lessons despite all their bickering. No kid should end up in that sort of situation, and she enjoys ballet, she really does. I ought to be back there. "I'm so sorry. I'm wrapping up here as quickly as I can, it's just...family matters, you know?"

"We understand, Kai, we really do. You can take as much time as you need for this matter you're attending to. It's only that, well..." He lets out a small sigh, the one he uses for convincing people he's serious about something. "I do worry about you. Are you sure you're doing the right thing?"

"Yeah," I say, and the metal cord they use on pay phones to keep them from being cut is trying to twist the circulation off in my wrist, the way I have it tangled up. "Yeah, I'm sure." I'm not, but it's too late to give up, and I can't leave Jack alone with Mannie, the two of them to find the Boss. I'm not just sticking with them because I want to see the Boss again. It's not that at all. I'm being responsible and seeing a job through, like my triad always says I should.

"Well, then, there's nothing to worry about," the director says, with a polite chuckle. "Oh! That reminds me, those three friends of yours who drop by sometimes? They stopped by a few days ago, and they seemed concerned. Did you forget to tell them you'd be out of town? They were asking after your whereabouts."

I'm going to have so much explaining to do when my triad catches up with me. "Yeah, I must have forgotten to pass it on to them. I'm sorry about the hassle..."

"No, it's none at all," he says, and then, "They did say something about returning later to see if you were back, or calling back to see if I had any more news. I don't suppose there's any way you could be contacted, that I could pass on to them if they ask again?"

"Um," I say, and weigh the pros and cons of talking to my triad as soon as possible, as opposed to waiting until this whole thing is taken care of. It'd be best to deal with them right away, no matter what Jack and Mannie think. Neither of them has to stick around for the meeting, if they're uncomfortable with it. "Well, I'm heading to Seattle to take care of some of this business, but I'm not sure where I'm staying there. Or, no, wait, tell them I'll be stopping by my dad's place, if they're going to be in the area or want to leave a message." There's one major Tether to Creation in Seattle, and that should be clear enough for them to figure out.

"I'd be happy to pass that on," the director says, and if I hate how smarmy he is with people, he's not such a bad guy when it comes to running the community center. I have to admit, he gets things done. "Thank you for checking in with me, Kai. I have a substitute assistant lined up for the immediate future, but please call again if your plans change."

"I'll do that," I say, and hang up as Mannie steps outside with three cups of coffee. "Oo, did you get me the butterscotch kind?"

"All they had was regular and decaf," Mannie says. He passes over a cup, and sets the other on top of the ice machine while Jack continues to bicker with the mechanic. "Did you work everything out with your employers?"

"Yeah, it's all good. The director's willing to give me as much time as I need, which is handy, though I'm hoping we won't need much more." I sincerely wish for a speedy resolution, because if this goes on much longer I'm going to have to call up my triad and ask them to pay the rent for me so that the landlord doesn't dump my bagpipes in the trash.

Jack stalks over to us, muttering. "Failed the diplomacy check," he says, and then, at our blank stares, "There is _no_ way this car is getting fixed as fast as we need it to. However, for an exorbitant sum, the mechanic's cousin will drive us to the next city, where we can rent a car."

"Exorbitant sum? Jack, you're _rolling_ in money." I don't add that it's largely not his money. He's an angel and a Servitor of Janus in good standing; however he came by the money, I'll assume it was justified, no matter how Judgment may get twitchy about it.

"Yes, but it's the _principle_ of the thing."


	6. An Intermission With Judgement

Dedan and Nomikos were comparing notes on what they'd thought of their most recent appointment when a reliever fluttered up to them, bobbing its head with the perfunctory, chipper greeting of someone determined to become a Servitor of Wind. "Greetings, most judgmental ones!" it chirped, beating its fire-rimmed wings furiously as it hovered in the air. "I have a message, for, quite possibly, you!"

Nomikos frowned, but Dedan said, "Thank you, little one. Who is the message from?"

The reliever bounced up and down in the air. "But I'm supposed to deliver it to a triad, and I see only two of you, which is, to my eyes, not quite the same as three! Have you lost your Seraph along the way? The message is indubitably specifically entirely for a triad! Not at all for a devout duo!"

Dedan coughed, to cover the sound of Nomikos grinding his teeth together. "However, as you face a majority of the triad, and we can promise to pass the message along to the remaining member, I believe it's appropriate for you to give us the message."

"Oh, well." It dropped down to the edge of the fountain where they sat, and, bouncing from one side to another, closed its eyes and recited: "Dear Dedan Nomikos and Adala comma I'm very sorry to have missed our last appointment period I was called away by urgent business comma to help out some friends of mine comma and it's taking longer than expected period I'll give you the full details when I see you next period I apologize for any concern I may have caused in the meantime period sincerely comma Kai comma Ofanite of Creation!" The reliever opened its eyes again, and beamed. "I especially like that last part. Why didn't _you_ fledge Ofanite? They're the best, you know."

The Malakite and Cherub exchanged glances, and Dedan raised a polite paw. "If you would hold a moment, could you tell us who you received this message from?"

"Oh! You ask all the hard questions." The reliever scrunched up its face and thought very hard. "I got it from this one guy who didn't want to come by here who got it from this other guy who got it from someone else! Who might have gotten it from somewhere else before that, I'm not sure." It bounced back into the air. "Always happy to be of service in the expedient delivery of important messages, judgey people! Toodle-oo! Have fun with the doing the right thing thing!" It darted off into the air, zipping around obstacles or nothing at all.

"Well," Nomikos said, after a moment, "at least we know our theory was correct."

"We ought to alert Adala immediately," Dedan said, and shook his mane irritably as he peered about the plaza to see if she were nearby. "Spending time with Servitors of Janus can't be good for Kai's grasp on the appropriate way for a Servitor of Eli to conduct itself in its Archangel's absence."

"It may be that they've given Kai reason to believe Eli can be found," Nomikos suggested, and the two of them considered this. "If so, I'm afraid Kai's sense may have flown out the window. He's a well-meaning sort, but..."

Both of them filled in the rest of that sentence silently.

"Someone needs to rescue him," Nomikos said. "It seems obvious to me that we're the correct choice for this assignment, as we have known him for longer than any other servants of the Most Just."

"Though we will, of course, need to clear this with the Most Just, before pursuing the matter."

"We ought to do so. However, we also ought to pursue this quickly, and to do so would fall under our assigned duty of ensuring Kai does not fall under the sway of corrupting influences."

They eyed each other for a moment. The Malakite blinked first. "Adala will know the Truth of the matter."

"No doubt." 

The two of them tromped away to find their Seraph, who would be able to settle as close to an argument as these two had yet come.


	7. In Which An Ofanite Discovers Several Uses For Its Time

Jack's out picking up Kelly's new vessel from a Creation Tether, which leaves Mannie and me in the motel room we got for the duration of the festival. It's not bad as motels go, clean sheets and no suspicious lingering smells, but Mannie's been muttering about how much he's used to better hotels since we got here, which is starting to get on my nerves.

I swear, jumping up and down on the bed isn't meant to get back at him for it. It's just that he's twitchy about wandering Seattle right now (something about a tech conference going on at a convention center) and someone has to stay with him while Jack's out and honestly, what's the point of having good springs on a bed if you're not going to do a bit of jumping? Which means the look he's giving me is unreasonable.

"You're bored," I say. "I can tell. Try this out, see if it helps?"

"I think my head would hit the ceiling," Mannie says. "And it's not very...dignified."

"You spend too much time worrying about dignity, and what you look like, and silly things like that," I say, though I have to admit I was glad when I ditched the preppie clothes he bought me for a tie-dye shirt from one of the vendors at the festival. It has a peace sign on it, which puts me in a good mood, because I've always been in favor of peace, though I can't subscribe to it whole-heartedly until demons stop making me do violence. On the other hand, life without getting to use phone books as weapons would be less fun, so I'll admit a certain ambivalence towards peace as an ultimate goal. "You should relax. There's no one else here to see you besides me, and I'm not going to hold it against you if you want to jump on the bed."

Mannie rolls his eyes, and sits down in the blue chair by the room's desk. Motel rooms are far from stylish, and not very creative, but perhaps they're meant to be soothing in their bland simplicity. "The lighting is all wrong," he says. "They haven't wired the place efficiently. They could reduce the noise on the environmental unit without affecting its performance with a few simple steps that nobody's bothered to do. I'm trying to be quiet and inconspicuous and not do anything about it and it's driving me up the wall. You can't stick me in the middle of this and ask me to _relax_."

"Man, you really did work for Vapula, didn't you?" I regret it as soon as I realize what I've said, and Mannie's already yanking on the doorknob, but he's gone too blank-eyed to realize it's locked before I tackle him.  
 That's more effective when Kelly does it.

His fingers have almost managed to undo the lock, unfocused as he is, so I slide down to the floor and pull his hands away from the door. "Mannie, Mannie, snap out of it." I'm more comfortable dealing with crying children than someone with Discord, but the level of unreasonable distress is similar, right? I walk backwards holding onto his wrists, and his hands snap down around my wrists until I think I'm going to end up with bruises from this, but that's okay, because he's not trying to run. "We keep moving," I say, "and everything's fine. See, here's the pattern. Away from the door, around the end table, past the bed, into the space between the beds, out again, back to the desk, behind the desk, over to the bathroom, out to the TV, back to the door, and that's one circuit and we keep going. You just keep moving."

His grip hasn't relaxed any, but his eyes are recovering from that awful blank stare. "Everything will end wrong," he said. "It's inevitable."

One of the benefits of dealing with children is that they're too self-absorbed to get philosophical. I'm no philosopher myself, and I don't have the way with words that some of my fellow Servitors do. But I'm not about to let him scamper off into a cul-de-sac of negative thinking. "No," I say, "it's all going to end up right, when we get to the last act and everyone is revealed for who they are."

"Why?"

A good question, and not one I was ready to answer, but I'm game for it. "Because it has to. If it's all going to end wrong, there's no point in trying, and if we don't try, that just makes it more likely it'll go wrong. So there's no reason to believe it'll go wrong, and you might as well believe it's going to go right. See?"

"You have such a way with words," Mannie murmurs, and he lets go of my wrists, so I let go of his and eye the bruises that are indeed showing up along my forearms. He's giving me one of those odd looks again, one that I can't interpret at all, but that's an excellent sign, as it means he's back to being the good old Renegade we all know and love. "You forget entropy, though," Mannie says. "It's all sliding downhill."

"You think too much about science." I drop back on the bed to stare at the ceiling, because it's starting to weird me out that I can't figure out why he's looking at me that way. And because I'm not good with words, but I need to talk to him somehow, I go with what I know. "Think of it this way. It's all ballet."

"...ballet." He sits down in the chair at the desk, folds his arms neatly across its back. "Explain."

"It's like this." My hands spin like figures in the opening scene of one of my favorite pieces, little children at play on a frozen lake. "Most art, like books, or paintings, you go and you make it, and you have... a piece. It's there. You can read it, look at it, it's not going anywhere. When you're done you can point to what you've accomplished and say, there, that. But ballet... It's movement." And I can't lie down for this, so now I'm pacing again, the circuit I pulled him through. "In dance, the art is you, and people aren't watching the piece, they're watching you perform it, and they're watching you _be_ the art. And when it's done, it's done, it's all in the moment and motion, as soon as you stop it's over. People can remember it, or you can dance it alone later to bring it back, but you can't hold it or take it somewhere or go show people what you've done, not without...doing it all again, from the beginning."

"Recordings," Mannie says, his fingernails tapping a perfect line of rhythm on the back of the chair. I could dance to that beat, if I had the space. "Film it, and you have it forever."

"No, you have a film of it, which is a sort of art, but it's not the same thing." I spin in the space between the beds, barely enough room, but it's space enough for one foot on the ground and my arms out around me. "The performance is over, and watching a tape of it isn't the same as bringing it back, no more than talking to someone is on the phone is like being there with them." He never calls, it's that old refrain in my mind, but I don't have time for that right now. "And so the Symphony... is ballet."

He makes a small gesture with his hand that says, _I do not follow._ I wish I could dance him the explanation, but I haven't the space or skill for that, so I'll settle for words. "It's _easy_ to not play your part properly, in the ballet. And playing it perfectly is difficult. You practice, learn, watch what everyone else is doing, compensate for injury, adjust for stage size, find a way to fill in for a dancer who's missing. Just doing nothing, or doing it badly? The easiest thing in the world." A pirouette, just for him. "But if everyone plays their part well, then the story ends the way it was written, and you have...art."

"Or you had art," he says, and I think at this point he's being difficult, but that's childish, and I can deal with children.

"Art doesn't stop just because you step off the stage. There's always another performance." I sweep him a bow, the stagey sort one uses in stories of kings and queens. "It all makes sense. See?"

"So you want to, ah, teach me ballet?"

"Metaphorically, yes. Redemption is stepping away from throwing peanuts at the stage and learning to dance the part that was written for you." I can only hope that what I'm doing now is an Act Two complication of the plot, where the princess runs away from home disguised as a boy with only her exiled husband's loyal servant to accompany her, because it's not the part I was playing when my Boss put me on stage. "I'd be happy to teach you the literal steps, but I don't think that's what you were asking."

"Lilim aren't so big on the group performances," he says, but I think he's feeding me lines now, because he wants to see what I say. Which I'm willing to work with, as it's far better than his restless fretting.

"So you do solo performances. A one-angel ballet. Very avant-garde." And this is enough to get a smile out of him, so I drop down on the bed to grin back. "See? Perfect sense."

The door swings open, and Mannie twitches, whatever he was about to say dropped, but it's just Jack with a bunch of shopping bags. "Where's Kelly?" I ask, noticing no one's followed him into the room. "Is Janus pissed enough to not give her another vessel?"

"No, but she might have wished so," Jack says, and drops the bags on the floor. "Anything interesting happen while I was out?"

"Not really," Mannie says. "We discussed art."

"Eh, fun," Jack says, and begins rooting through the bags. "I bought you more socks like you asked for, Kai, and a jacket in case it rains tomorrow like they're forecasting."

"What, you paid for them?" Mannie asks, and Jack glares.

"Wind, not Theft. I'm not incapable of conducting a simple trade of cash for goods, if it seems appropriate." Jack can't stay offended for long, so he flops down on the bed beside me. "Figured out what you want to hit tomorrow?"

" _Cymbeline_ , of course." I was thrilled when I found out they'd shuffled the schedule around to put _A Winter's Tale_ first, because while that's not a bad play as Shakespeare goes (and none of his plays are what you could call _bad_ at that), it's not my favorite by a long shot. "And then in the afternoon it's Titus Andronicus, unless you'd rather see _Two Gentleman of Verona_ as I'm up for either, and in the evening a stop at the place where a children's drama group has the kids doing short scenes. Six-year-old King Lears are adorable. Of course, they usually have the kids do something light from a comedy, one of the parts that isn't talking about sex." The jacket's an ordinary sort of thing, mass-produced and serviceable, but the socks are all knit in various colorful patterns with enough irregularities to show they were hand-made. "Hey, you stopped at a crafts place. Thanks!"

"Sure thing," Jack says, and then blinks, seeing the bruises on my arms. "Discussing art, huh? So that's what the kids are calling it these days." He laughs. "Essence is good where you can get it."

"What?"

Jack turns to Mannie, then back to me, and then shakes his head. "Never mind." Which means he's being opaque again. I have to wonder what Mannie thought it meant, given the way his face is going through the most remarkable series of suppressed expressions. Must ask him some time when Jack's not around, because it looks like embarrassment was at least one of the emotions.

I dig further into the bags, mostly for curiosity's sake, and find boxes of junk food. "Jack, this stuff is awful. Mass-produced junk, bad for the body, over-packaged, marketed heavily to children. Why do you keep buying it?"

"But I _like_ that stuff," Jack says, and rescues his Twinkies before I can toss it in the trash. "Besides, you never complain about the coffee from convenience stores, and that has to be at least as mass-produced as this."

"It's coffee. That gives it a default rating of Good, edging into Holy if it's done well." Not that I'd expect a Mercurian to understand the joys of caffeine the way I do. I need to figure out how to make coffee at home properly; I can manage the instant stuff with only a minor mess if I'm careful heating up the water to put it in, but I've gone through four coffeemakers trying to brew my own, and Nomikos asked me nicely to never, ever buy a coffee bean grinder ever again.

The door opens again, and this must be Kelly, given the surly expression on her face. I can see what Jack means about their Superior getting annoyed at how quickly she's going through vessels. The new one looks maybe thirteen years old, a girl in fluffy short pigtails and tight clothes. The halter top she's wearing reads "Naughty Angel" in fake rhinestones across the front. "I do _not_ want to talk about it," she says, and sits down on the bed across from Jack and me.

"Demons of Seattle, watch out tonight," Jack says. "Though you'll get some funny looks running around like that late at night."

"I said I didn't want to talk about it," Kelly says. She sighs, and then turns to me. "Kai, I don't suppose you could... you know. Age the body, a little bit?"

"I’m not sure I ought to be doing that when your Boss gave you that vessel for a reason," I say, "but if it's important--"

"Not that important." She rummages through Jack's bags, and pulls out a black jacket, some trendy faux-leather thing two sizes too big for her. "How am I supposed to carry a knife hidden in _this_ outfit? It's ridiculous. I can't scout out demons in bars or clubs, I can't wander on the streets past about ten at night without getting questions..." She takes the kukri Jack hands her, and attempts to arrange it beneath the folds of the jacket. "It's going to be a long night. Anyone want to play poker?"

"Sure," Jack says, and then, "Mannie, Kai, I'll spot you each some starting cash, if you want to play.

"Sure thing!" I get out of the way while Kelly shoves bags around so that we can lay out the cards on the bed. "Poker is the one where four aces are good, right?"

"You've never played?" Kelly looks up from shuffling.

"Well, I've watched a lot of old Westerns, so I think I know how it goes."

Kelly grins. "Good enough."

Two hours later I'm out of all the money Jack gave me, Kelly's easily in the lead, and Mannie's staying near even with Jack, mostly by pointing out every time Jack tries to cheat. None of us have seen Kelly cheating yet, which means either she's exceptionally good at poker, or, more likely, she's exceptionally good at cheating. The game's too sedentary for my taste anyway, so I grab my jacket and head out with a brief mumble about getting some fresh air. Getting cooped up in a motel room isn't my idea of fun, not without a lot more instruments involved, and possibly a tape recorder. I take my piccolo with me, not for any particular reason except that I haven't had a chance to practice in days, and who knows where I might end up wandering?

It's too nice of a night to want to really resonate a particular place to go. I'm happy enough to let the Symphony hum its merry way beyond my watching, without troubling it to ask where the best coffee shop in the area is.

I could be disturbed by all the Starbucks places I pass, but I comfort myself with the knowledge that by coffee they'll be redeemed from their own mass-market soulless existence.

Besides, I like Frappuccinos.

Maybe the Symphony knows me better than I thought, because I find myself wandering through Pike Place, surrounded by the crowds of tourists and locals flooding the area. I may not be Mercurian, but I like people, and it's nice to let myself be swamped in the noise for a while, not distracted by any other concerns. This may not be the bazaar in Heaven, but I think it's as close as Earth gets. I wish I'd thought to grab some money when I headed out, but since I'm cash-free I just content myself with examining the crafts, foods, products. It's a beautiful sight. I could spend a decade or two here, finding out everything that's being made, how it's being made, who makes it... No, I'd be dancing in the street by the second week. This isn't my type of art. But it's beautiful, and I could almost expect to see the Boss wandering through here, or sitting behind the booth with the silk dyed in swirling colors.

But of course, it's not him. It never is.

I turn the corner onto the actual Pike Place road and it's like a camera flash in the mind. I find myself grinning more widely at the familiar feel to this area, and it doesn't surprise me in the least that this would be a Tether. Must be Marc's, because if it belonged to the Boss I would know about it already. Craftsmen and farmers and restaurants, buying and selling and everywhere product for cash or service. I may be more involved in the making of art than acquiring it, but it's a Word I can appreciate.

I take a look around, and this time I do listen to what the Symphony wants to tell me. Step around the cute couple being a little too affectionate in public, wait for the kid in the baseball hat to run by, and then it's a straight line (except for the detour around the tall old woman holding a red balloon) into the coffee shop.

There must be several hundred coffee shops in Seattle, but most of them wouldn't have a reliever lurking behind the counter in Celestial form, fluttering anxiously over the beans in the roasting pan. I catch its eye, and it flaps its wings, gives me a briefly suspicious look, and then darts away into the back. By the time I'm at the counter a white-haired woman in a long green shawl has come out to raise an eyebrow at me, the kid behind the counter scurrying out of her way. "May I help you?"

"How much espresso can you fit into one of those?" I ask, pointing to the big round mugs advertised for their larges. I could nearly put my _head_ into one of those mugs.

"Young..." She pauses minutely, eyes my vessel, and I try to remember what sex I'm currently wearing. "...lady, do you not want to sleep for weeks?"

"I don't sleep much anyway," I say, and she gives me a fraction of a nod.

"Dear child," she says, "it has been too long. Would you care to come to the back so that we can chat, out of the way of _paying_ customers?"

"Not at all," I say, and follow her to the back room.

When the door is closed behind us, she gives me a more critical look. "Only passing through, or I would have received more warning. It didn't sound to be an emergency. Wind?"

"Only passing through," I say, and I take a moment to admire the sheer variety of coffee types stored back here. "Creation. I'm here for the festival."

"Ah," she says, and the word carries a world of meaning I don't care to try to interpret. "You're certainly welcome here." Another look at my vessel. "Are you female?"

"Um." I check my pants. "Nope, sorry. You know, when I asked for something ambiguous, I was originally hoping it would _avoid_ all these silly gender roles and expectations, not confuse people."

"Your Superior gives people interesting lessons in knowing what they're asking for," she says. She hands me a very small cup. "Espresso, as you asked. Though not as much as you might want. Ofanim are bad enough without having them ricocheting off the walls."

"What, you can tell?" I haven't disassembled anything, and I've only paced the room twice. It's a nice room. It's full of coffee beans. I think those two statements are redundant. I can't say it's Heaven, because I've been there and it's not, but it's close. I wonder if anyone has ever written a ballet about coffee? I know Mozart wrote a song about it. "But, yeah, we're on our way through, stopping for the festival, good stuff like that. I thought I'd stop in and say hi. Don't suppose there are any chores you need help with? I have nothing going for the night, and I'd like to keep moving."

"We, you say." She sits down in a chair, her hands folded comfortably across her lap. "Would you do me the honor of introducing yourself and those you're with, as long you're stopping by?"

"Kai, Ofanite of Creation. I'm with Jack and Kelly--they're Wind, Mercurian and Malakite, respectively--and Mannie, who's, um, not affiliated with anyone." I'm pretty sure she's not a Seraph. I hope she's not a Seraph. I'd rather not give my explanations to someone I don't know, and who might not understand how tricky these things are.

She raises a singular eyebrow, an expression I've never mastered on any of my vessels, and only says, "I see. Tatnai, Kyriotate of Trade, and Seneschal of this Tether."

Seneschal? I am so glad she's not a Seraph.

She lets me pace and drink for a while, and babble about the places I've been lately, and if she can tell that I'm editing out aspects of where I'm going, and why, and with whom, she doesn't call me on any of it. I like talking about the things I've seen to people who haven't been there, and she listens to me with the expression Kyriotates use so often, that says, "Ah, another perspective." When she's had enough of that, she says, "There is something you could help me with." She beckons over the reliever, who's been flitting around from bin to bin almost as fast as I'm pacing. Now there's a future Ofanite, if it keeps up the good work. "My child, Orlaith, wished to send a gift to a friend, but could not safely travel the distance. Would you take it there? Orlaith would make the deal, if you're willing."

"I'd be glad to." Children are adorable in all forms, even the grubby spoiled brats who wail in the middle of the parking lot at grocery stores, though those ones are adorable more in potential than in actuality. Orlaith has gold-laced butterfly wings, and shy silver eyes. "What can I help you with, kid?"

"I have a friend in Redmond," the kid says, in a voice of flutes and bells, and what a beautiful thing to hear Angelic spoken out loud down here. I'm happy to agree that there are many things written in English that are divine, but no language can hold a candle to the true one. "She used to work for Mama before she got old, and now she can't move so much. Would you take her a present for me?" It considers me gravely, and adds, "I can pay you one Essence for the trip."

I'd as soon do it for free, and for the excuse to see more of the city, but when in a Tether of Trade, trade I will. So I say, "It sounds like a fair deal to me," and the reliever beams, and goes darting away to one of the bins in the back.

"Blue Mountain," it says. I pick up the bag of coffee and I can nearly feel the caffeine soaking through the bag and my skin into my bloodstream. Bad Kai: concentrate! "It's her favorite. Mama has the address, and if you tell her Aunt Tatty sent you, she'll know who it's from." It gives me the Essence solemnly, serious in the way children are about important things such as these. I'll have to come back and play it Flight of the Bumblebee some time, and see if it likes to dance to the tune.

I'm off again, address in my mind and calling out to the Symphony for directions. Bus route, take a transfer, run a block, another bus... Tatnai was kind enough to pass me several dollar bills and change for the fare, and I spend the bus parts doing my best to resist the delightful bag of beans. It's meant for someone else, who will, perhaps, want to share? No, that's selfish of me to think that way, especially when I took payment for the trip.

I wouldn't call Redmond gloomy, even if the late hour gives me a darker atmosphere the further I travel from Seattle, but it's certainly...sullen. Nothing overwhelming, but a faint undercurrent of resigned urgency, a need for things I can't identify. I imagine Lilim would have great fun here. Must ask Mannie if he's ever been around; Microsoft must be Vapulan, right?

I end up at the back door of a bar, and the man who answers the back door is quick enough to let me in once I say who sent me. "It's good that Gramma's friends still visit her," he says, a man nearly as tall as Jack and even bulkier. "She tells me stories sometimes of the things she used to do when she was younger, and all the marvelous adventures she had with Aunt Tatty. Most of them made up, I think," he adds, before he opens the inner door. "But still, marvelous stories."

Gramma sits in a back room that's half storage and half office, on a comfortable chair with her legs stretched out. Wind chimes hang from the ceiling, and rustle when the door opens. She looks up from where she's working with a wire cutter and pair of pliers on a strip of thin metal. "Good evening," she says. "Aren't you up late for a young lady."

"Aunt Tatty asked me to bring you a gift," I say, and I pass over the bag of coffee. It's easier to give it up than I expected. "Her, um, son did, even. And they both send their regards."

"How thoughtful." The door closes behind her grandson, and she fixes a sharp gaze on me. "So tell me, young lady, what're you bringing with the coffee?"

I run a finger through a wind chime overhead. It's remarkably well tuned for the fragments of metal that make it up, a glass and electricity sort of sound. I know a Seraph of Lightning who would appreciate it. "Only that," I say. "I was only passing through, and she asked me to do a job for her, since I had the time and she didn't."

"I am old, then," says the woman, disappointment drawing her words down into something more resigned than sorrow. "Once she would have asked me to do something grand, but these days I receive good wishes. No matter," she continues briskly, and takes my hand. "Would you sit here beside me, or--ah, I see, you would be happier moving. I've known your sort."

"Thou art as wise as thou art beautiful," I say. I run my hands along the wind chimes hanging from the ceiling, and they each have a tiny song of their own. "Did you make all of these?"

She smiles at me. "Yes," she says, "and when I was younger I sold them in the market, though these days I haven't the energy to sit behind a table all day. Would you like one? It's only a hobby, now."

"You make such marvelous things. My Boss would approve. I know I do." She smiles at me, and I back at her. "I've heard you tell stories--"

"You don't want to listen to an old woman tell stories," she says, "not your sort, I know that much. You want to be running off somewhere else, and you'd listen to be polite, but I have plenty of grandchildren who'll listen to what I say. And great-grandchildren, in another few years, will be old enough to listen. Go on, take one you like, and be on your way." She pats the bag of coffee with hands covered in spider webs of veins, long yellowing nails. "You've already done me a service for the night. Never could stand tea, blasted weak stuff that it is."

"My pleasure." I choose a set of chimes with a spinning twist of metal in the center, like a pirouette or a dancing Seraph. "You should come to the festival tomorrow, if you can manage it. They're doing _Cymbeline_."

"Who was she?"

"He's a king," I say, and drop a bow from the door. "Good night, good night. Parting is such sweet sorrow."

"That I shall say good night, 'til it be morrow." She gives me a regal tilt of her chin, and I spin my way out in the night back to the bus stop, wind chimes jangling all the way.

On the last bus back, someone gasps in the middle of the small murmur of people talking to their friends. Up ahead of us, across the skyline, fireworks. No rhyme or reason to them, nothing stately like an exhibit set to music, just bam-smash-boom of one after another, several at once. Someone on top of a building is lighting as many as he can at a time.

It's nice to know that my friends are keeping themselves entertained while I'm away.


	8. In Which We Illustrate The Tactical Approaches Of Various Words

I'm not back in the motel until an hour before dawn, what with one thing and another to spin me off in various directions on the way back. I find Kelly and Jack playing some card game I don't recognize while Mannie sits and the desk and scribbles away at the motel's notepad.

"You missed out," Jack says, and slaps his hand down on the pile of cards between them. "Got you!"

"Except that's a seven, not an eight." Kelly pulls two cards from his hand, and examines them. "And he's right, you did miss out."

"I saw the fireworks on the way back from Redmond," I say, and hang the wind chimes from the lamp by the desk where they swing lazily in the breeze from the AC unit. "Nice job at finding fireworks this late at night."

"We know someone who knows someone," Jack says, with a gesture that indicates he has resources I couldn't dream of. I have no doubt it's true; Windies have a remarkable amount of organization for people who can't stay in any place longer than three days. "But that wasn't what I was talking about."

"So explain?" I begin to pace in my good old pattern, and it's a comfortable pattern, a nice pacing round that takes me by every person in the room twice a circuit. I can see Kelly and Jack's hands, and Jack has five sevens in his. I don't think they're playing with two decks of cards.

"So we're wandering around," Jack begins.

"Not so much wandering as going somewhere specific. We checked the phone book, and asked around a bit after places that sounded, um," Kelly continues.

"--nefarious. Except not in so many words. And I did most of the asking, because no one wants to tell a thirteen-year-old girl where to get drugs. But anyway, we're wandering through the bad part of town."

"More like lurking. There was this handy alleyway, the sort where you know Fleurity's type are hanging out. So I go wandering in there--"

"See? Wandering."

"So I go _stomping_ in there looking as confident as I can, which should be setting off warning alarms for people, but instead makes them think I'm stupid, which works just as well."

"Not that any of us would ever think that."

"Shut _up_ , Jack. My story. So I find someone who's willing to sell hard drugs to a thirteen-year-old, I beat him up myself because _some_ people can't help--"

"Oh, come on. He was _human_ \--"

"Shut _up_ , Jack. And in any case being pummeled by someone half their weight is enough to put the fear of God into most people, which is appropriate, and then when he's down for the count I take his wallet."

"Lather, rinse, repeat."

"On number three we hit an actual demon. Now that was fun."

"That was fun? You'd been having fun since number one. That was the first time I got to hit anyone."

"And you didn't have fun?"

"...well, yes. I did."

"So there we go. That was fun. He had a good chunk of cash on him, so we decided to call it a night, and went to find some friends with some serious explosives--"

"Except they had already used all the explosives, and all they had left was the fireworks."

"Which was just as good, so we broke into a building, got to the roof, set everything off, and went home."

"Except for that stop on the way."

"Shut _up_ , Jack. My story."

"Not that part. So Kelly's playing her sweet and innocent drug addict act, and it turns out she's hitting on an undercover cop, and nearly gets arrested for solicitation--"

"Which wasn't my intention. I was trying to buy drugs, not offer sex."

"Silly humans. Tricks are for kids." Jack coughs. "Um. Except not. So the cop's trying to haul Kelly off in the police car, and he's a good guy, we don't really want to _hurt_ him, so I yell, 'Look! Flying monkeys!' and point up at the sky--"

"--and he's going to be smug for _ages_ that it worked, you know. But in any case, we make a run for it, and half an hour later we're safely back home, no worse for the wear."

"Except for the bloodstains."

"None of them ours."

"True. Oh, and several thousand dollars. Did you want buy anything, as long as we're here?"

"Um," I say, and pause for a moment between the two beds, bouncing on my toes. "It's a great story, and I'm almost sorry to have missed it, but where was Mannie in all of this?"

"Back here. Said he'd be fine." Kelly collects all the cards and begins to shuffle them back together again. It's just one deck. I wonder how much having all five sevens in your hand is worth in poker? It ought to beat four aces. "And, hey, who're we to drag him through back alleys if he'd rather not be there?" She's not looking at Mannie.

He slides the notepad away into his jacket. "I believe I'm capable of taking care of myself for a few hours in an empty, locked motel room."

I didn't think he wanted to be left alone for that long. I didn't think it was a good idea to leave a twitchy Renegade alone for that long. And I definitely didn't think Jack and Kelly would do so without a better reason than boredom. But I'm not the planning sort, and it's possible they're all seeing something I'm not, so I'm not about to call them on it. 

Flight of the Bumblebee would be a great way to lighten things up, but I don't think the people in motel rooms near us would appreciate it.

I drag them all out of the room at dawn, down to the bus stop. "If we get there before it opens for seating, we'll be sure to get good seats. And I'd like another shirt."

Kelly shudders as the bus approaches. "Actually, Jack and I were thinking of heading to the marketplace, climbing up somewhere high, and dumping all the money into the crowd as soon as a good wind picks up. Why don't we catch you tonight, back at the room?"

"...you don't want to watch the plays?"

Jack ruffles my hair. "No offense, Kai, but literature isn't our thing. Look, it's big crowds, real public place, and I'm sure Tatnai will have a one host keeping an eye on things. Local Kyrio who takes care of a Trade Tether, great person, very responsible. You two will be fine, and if you run into who you're looking for, it's not like the two of us have anything to say to him."

"But this is _Shakespeare_ , Jack." The bus opens its doors. "You're sure?"

"We'll catch you tonight," he says, and waves cheerfully goodbye.

Mannie takes the window seat, and spends the ride staring outside.

Three hours later, Mannie is staring at the blanket I bought like it's going to bite him. I don't know what he has against tie-dye. "It's raining," he says.

"Just a light drizzle. It's not bothering anyone else around here." I've lost count of how many origami cranes I've folded from the advertisements and flyers people keep handing us. They're slightly damp, but holding up remarkably well, a little flock along one edge of the blanket. "I can get you an umbrella if you want, but we'd have to put it away once the performance starts. Don't want to block the view of the stage for anyone else."

"No, wouldn't want to be _rude_ , would we." He's definitely sulking. "Just because the locals are so used to having a steady drizzle down the back of their necks that they don't mind it anymore, doesn't mean we'd be justified in keeping ourselves dry, no."

"You're being childish. Trust me, I'd know." I roll over onto my back and put together a frog out of an ad for palm readings. "Here. Want a frog? Or I can make a parrot, if you prefer parrots, but it might take me a few tries. Those are a lot trickier."

"I don't know why you keep _making_ things. They don't do anything."

"Sure they do. See, if you put the frog down on a hard surface, and press down the back, it jumps." I try to demonstrate, but the paper is a bit too damp. "In theory."

Mannie hunches over the notepad from the motel, and begins scribbling again. "There's no point in making something unless it _does_ something. Everyone has the occasional failed experiment, but most of us know better than to keep repeating them."

"You'd do well in Lightning, I guess. They build things. I just, well. Dance." I'm tired of lying around here, but I'm not about to leave him alone again. Shouldn't have left last night, and I wouldn't have if I'd know Jack and Kelly were going to ditch him. He needs some company. Possibly protection. Someone to be a good influence. "Want any cotton candy? There's a vendor over there..."

"No. Thank you." He stuffs away the notebook again. "Are you sure your, ah, employer wouldn't prefer a sunnier climate?"

"Hey, who am I to figure out what the Boss would like today? And gray skies can be lovely, if you look at them right. If you like a sunny atmosphere, you should see Novalis's garden. The parties are great. A few months back I had a chance to stop there for a while, and did you know they can make wine out of flowers? Never would have guessed that. Of course, when I got back I went and checked out this one book about dandelion wine, except it actually ended up being a bunch of short stories. Good writing, though."

"Do you _ever_ stop talking, Kai?"

"Well. Yes." I fold three more cranes, and arrange them around the frog. Poor little frog, all left out and lonely with no one else to talk to. "You know, Mannie, you'd be a lot happier if you stopped stressing about what you don't know. We're all doing the best we can given the circumstances, right?"

"Stop. Trying to _fix_ me." That's more of a snarl than I've gotten from him before. A shudder runs over him, and he composes his expression into something blank and polite again.

But you're broken. I don't say it, even I know better than that. "Sorry," I say instead, "didn't mean to bother you," and I'm back to folding paper cranes. 

The frog's surrounded by almost an army when a little kid, maybe five years old, stops by the blanket and peers down at them. "What's that?" He carries a plastic sword stuck through his belt, nearly dragging the ground.

"Cranes, kid. Want one?" There doesn't seem to be anyone around with a hand on this kid, or even watching him. He crouches down, chooses a blue crane from the bunch. "Where are your parents?"

"Dunno." He yanks at the crane until it falls apart, pouts. "It broke!"

"More precisely, you broke it." I hand him another one, this time a glossy ad folded into one of the larger cranes. "Here, see if you can leave it be, and it won't break, okay? Are you sure you don't know where your parents are?"

"Dunno." He disassembles the crane's head, little fingers picking it apart deftly. "They were talking, so I went to look at stuff."

"Right." I stand up, and grab the kid's free hand before he can go after another defenseless paper bird. "Hey, I'll be right back, okay? I'm gonna take this kid over to security so they can find his parents."

Mannie shrugs without looking up.

"Right, then. Come on, kid. What's your name?"

"My friends call my Ozzie. What's yours?" He has clammy fingers, but trots along beside me happily enough.

"The name's Kai. You should stick close to your parents. They might be worried if you wander off on your own." Ten minutes until the show starts, and the crowd is getting thick, especially around the vendors where everyone wants their last minute pretzel or blanket or commemorative T-shirt. "Now--I thought the security checkpoint was right here." It looks like they've moved, and I can't figure out where to through the crowd. "Half a minute and I'll find them again--"

"Hey!" Ozzie says, and lets go of my hand. "I saw someone!"

"There are a lot of someones here right now--oh, do you mean one of your parents?" He's already plowing through the crowd with the determination of someone who's not going to let being short stand in his way. I can't let him wander into a crowd full of strangers now that I've walked further from where his parents might have been, so I follow, wishing once again that I could move through crowds the way Jack does. I want to get from point A to point B, and there are all these _people_ in the way.

I break through the crowd to see the kid disappearing behind the stage. "Aw, come _on_ , kid." So it's off to follow Ozzie wherever he may go. His toy sword has fallen out from his belt, so I pick it up and keep going, past piles of sound equipment and props to an empty space half-surrounded by trees, where red plastic cups litter the ground.

"Kid? Where are you?" Turning around, I don't see any sign of a child. I should have started running as soon as I hit open space. "Come on out, your parents are going to be worried by now.

"Don't worry," says a breezy voice, so smug that I hate it already, and stepping out from where he'd been waiting, a man with dragon tattoos all along his forearms. He grins. I can see his gold-capped teeth. "Junior's run back to his parents by now. He'll be fine. You, on the other hand, might not be."

Quick assessment of the tactical situation: one plastic sword in hand, one of me. Not too bad yet. And this is reassuring until there's a person in dark clothing, standing beside him, and she gives me this look as if I'm standing between her and a good nap. Okay, tactical situation rapidly degrading. Why did Jack and Kelly have to be so, so Windy? I wish I had Mannie here for backup. Even if he does run at the first sign of trouble, he'd give these two some pause. "Excuse me, but do I know you?"

"Don't think so," says the man. "You wouldn't. Stupid, ignorant sort that you are. You wouldn't recognize the truth if it spat on you."

"I'm sensing some hostility here." I could really use Kelly here right now, or Jack, or one of Tatnai's birds to come flying overhead, but I see nothing but these two, and hear nothing but the distant roar of the crowd. The performance is running late; they always are. Edging ever so slightly towards a place where I can run, though I don't know if there's anyone else around.

"Hurry up," says the woman, "so we can get this over with." Her frown is full of distant ennui.

"Stupid. Worthless. Pathetic. Useless." The man's smile is deadlier than a scorpion, and I can feel it pour at me. Hopeless, helpless, the wrong place at the wrong time, doing the wrong thing and there's nothing I can do to make it right, I've been abandoned by everyone and nobody cares--

No. The Boss cares, and I'm doing his work, one way or another. I toss off the emotions and smile back at him. "Nice try, Habbie, but I'm not so weak as that." And a plastic sword is as good as any other weapon when I'm wielding it. Using the resources I've been given... creatively.

He staggers back from the blow with an expression of sheer shock across his face, then anger, and it's a beautiful sight to me. I hold the plastic sword in front of me. "You sure you don't want to run before my friends get here?" Here's to hoping on a bluff.

I suck at poker. "They're far away," he says, "and one wimp angel isn't going to stop me." The Djinn hasn't moved in yet, watching us like she hasn't yet decided if it's worth her time to interfere, or if she'd rather just--Eli's feathers, the Game's finally caught up with us. And there's another wave of emotion trying to drown me. Terrified. Lost. Surrounded by enemies.

It's easier to send it back the second time, now that I know what's coming. "What, you think I'm afraid of a little Trauma?" The Habbalite shudders, winces. And, oh crud, he ate the dissonance instead of running screaming or curling up into a ball. So I smack him across the head with my sword again before he can get over it.

Right when the Djinn finally decides it's worth her time to pounce. Sidestep that, slam the Habbalite across the face again, he's not very good at dodging, is he? One on either side, and at least they're here bothering me and not Mannie--

\--who's all alone, not paying much attention to his surroundings, and if that kid wasn't a demon it was a Shedite riding one--

Duck dodge dance, they can't get a hit in, they're no friends of mine that I should hesitate when they attack. But I can only hit one person at a time, and there's always someone behind me right when I'm trying to attack, and I'm being, frankly, not very effective. The woman catches me with one punch and I'm staggering backwards from it, and she calls out something in Helltongue.

I don't have _time_ for this. And Mannie needs me, needs to get out of here before something bigger jumps him. So it's time to dodge these two people and leave them to their own party, run for--

\--my chest feels like something exploded in front of me. My feet catch on the ground, I'm not supposed to be falling, it's not what I do, it isn't. Rolling back to my feet the Habbie's almost on me, so I slam my cheap plastic sword through his gut, and behind him, I should have wondered, I should have guessed, one more person.

I hate Calabim. I do, I do. The world explodes again around me.


	9. An Intermission With Judgment

Dedan approached two Elohim of the Wind, three relievers, and a shy young Kyriotate before he found another Cherub with whom he might speak. A fox with great white wings, she spiraled in the air and barked at him a few times before she consented to be questioned by Judgment.

Adala stayed out of direct line of sight of the Wind Cherub, where she could hear but not be seen. This tactic had a touch of deceit that she did not like, but Windies scattered in all directions if a full triad stalked towards them, or commented politely on the weather when asked direct questions by a Seraph.

"I know Kai," the Cherub said, wrapping her tail neatly over her feet. "I spent a night at his apartment once, when I was traveling with another Windy who roomed there from time to time. A nice enough fellow, dreadful cooking. I convinced my friend to leave when the Ofanite began to practice the bagpipes. Nearly as dreadful as his cooking. He seemed a calm enough sort, as Creationers go." She scratched lazily at the grass with one paw. "Why are you asking?"

"We're concerned for his welfare," Dedan said. "We've heard he's traveling with fellow Servitors of yours, and wish to make sure he hasn't encountered any harm."

"Safe as houses when he's with Windys," said the fox-Cherub, and she laughed, showing pointy white teeth. "Worried that we're a corrupting influence?"

"He was left in his position by his Archangel," Dedan pointed out, choosing wisely not to go into detail about how reliable that Archangel's orders might be considered. "It seems unwise for him to leave it so abruptly. Do you know where he is?"

She licked her nose. "Ah, well. News does get around, sometimes, and we try to keep track of each other, but who can track the wind?"

"That's a lovely rhetorical question. Would you answer my question?"

"Maybe." She beat her wings and rose to eye level with him, her sharp nose nearly touching Dedan's golden mane. "Why are you hunting poor little Kai, and what do you want out of his friends?"

"We only want to make sure that he's safe, and where he ought to be." Dedan had much experience with reassuring nervous sorts who couldn't understand that the triad only wanted what was best and just. "He sent us a message. He knows that we have his best interests in mind. Where is he?"

"Somewhere safe, with two good friends." She laughed. "Besides, if I told you where he was this very moment, he'd be gone from it by the time you reached that place. We keep moving." She suited action to words, turning tail to his face in a shameless display of impropriety and lack of respect for authority, and flew off into the trees.

Dedan padded over to Adala. "Most Holy?"

"Seattle, Guardian." Adala frowned as they moved back towards where they had left Nomikos tracking down the passing of that message, though neither expected him to have much success. "What's in Seattle, that he would go there?"

Dedan searched his memory for references to the place; it was not a city they had visited in any of their rounds. "Coffee?"

Adala blinked two of her eyes, then another two. "Would Kai leave his duty for coffee?"

"Well," Dedan said, "he is an Ofanite."

"Truth."


	10. An Intermission With Judgment And Trade

The Seneschal of the local Creation Tether hadn't seen Kai at all, but recommended, if reluctantly, that they check with some of the local Windies. The local Windies refused to be found, and thus the triad found themselves sitting in the local Trade Tether, drinking coffee morosely.

"He could have already moved on," Dedan pointed out, adding another packet of sugar to his mug. "We don't know why he's here, or how long he intended to stay."

"Truth." Adala leapt up as a nearby patron turned to them, indicated politely that the Seneschal was ready to meet with them, and then went back to reading his paper. "But we ought not give up."

The three of them tromped together into the back room of the coffee shop, where a young woman in an apron waited for them. "I welcome you," the Kyriotate said politely, giving them the respect due a triad but no more, as Seneschal of this place. "What brings you here?"

"We're looking for an Ofanite who we heard might be in this place," Nomikos said, seating himself on an empty chair. "Its name is Kai, and it is a Servitor of Eli. We would like to speak with it about certain recent actions."

"Kai? She--it was here last night, and ran an errand for us. Seemed pleasant and helpful enough." The Seneschal spoke carefully, as if she feared drawing accusations of guilt on someone by wording a description badly. "I believe I saw it at the Shakespeare festival today."

Dedan turned to Adala. "Do you think he would come here for that?" She spread her arms in a noncommittal answer.

"He's not where I saw him last," Tatnai said, with a small frown. "I don't see him anywhere in the crowd. I'll take a closer look."

They waited as the Seneschal took care of several small chores in the back room with one body, and searched the festival with another.

"Ah!" Tatnai frowned, and paused in the middle of pouring a bag of beans. "The child has run into trouble. He's still breathing, but unconscious. This will get awkward if other authorities move in... I'll alert his friends, they're nearer than you are, and the body I'm wearing there can't do much. I only had two Forces watching."

"He's hurt?" Dedan leapt up. "Quickly, where is he?"

"I didn't see the fight," Tatnai said, shaking her head. "I should have been watching more carefully, I knew that something was up... I'll go with you." She opened up a drawer in her desk, and a fluffy hamster ran into her hand. "Here," she said, depositing it in Nomikos's waiting hands. "I've sent someone to help, but they may need more assistance. I don't know what the child encountered, but it was more than it could handle."

Nomikos bowed quickly, and the triad left, Tatnai-hamster directing their steps.

At the park they found only bloodstains in a secluded area, and signs of a fight. Dedan crouched down and picked up a plastic sword coated in blood. "He was here, but he's gone now. Tatnai, did you see who took him?" He let the toy fall back to the ground, stood up to scan the surrounding area for any blood trail.

The hamster squeaked twice.

"I almost wish his vessel had been killed," Nomikos said, "for he wouldn't stay in Trauma long, knowing how he bounces back, and we could keep him safe. I don't know where he may have gone."

"This has gone on long enough without clarification," Adala said. "We will speak with the Most Just when he comes for our reports tomorrow, and ask him how we ought to proceed. In the meantime, Dedan, Nomikos, search the area for any signs of him where a flying creature might not see, or any trace of what may have hurt him. If demons wish to interfere with our matters, we will deal with them appropriately."

The Cherub and Malakite nodded, and spread out, while Adala was left to watch the area. The Seraph folded her arms together, and stared at the bloody bit of plastic on the ground. "What have you gotten yourself into, Kai?"


	11. In Which The Bribe Is Not Obvious

Thrum of a motor, reasonable speed. I open my eyes to stare at the back of two seats in front of me. "Hey."

"At last, he wakes." Kelly's driving, and Jack turns around in his seat to smile at me. Anxious smile, that. I must look a sight. "We were starting to worry. You were barely alive by the time we got to you."

"Oh?" My legs don't want to move, and my whole chest hurts horribly. I wiggle my fingers experimentally. Movement. Good. "Calabite. Damn damned Calabite."

"Thought as much. But don't worry, you seem to be recovering."

"Ofanite of Eli. Duh. Heal fast." My throat hurts. "Where's Mannie?"

Jack loses his smile. "We don't know. Somewhere around when the Game hit you, he disappeared. No idea if they got him or not, but I'm thinking not, by the way they came snapping at our heels. It seemed like a good time to move."

"Gotta find him." I can sit up if I'm careful, though it makes my head go all spinny. I wish my mind could decide if I'm vessel-bound or celestial, instead of trying to spin when I'm in human form and then making me sick. "Rescue him."

"I think Mannie can take care of himself," Kelly says. "Especially after the number we did on those Gamesters. And after Tatnai had a few words with them. I think your triad was there too, but we didn't stick around to check."

"Adala and Dedan and Nomikos? I need to let them know I'm okay, and ask them to help--"

"Shut up and lie down," Jack says, "before you hurt yourself. You're in no condition to do anything but heal. We'll work it out once you're feeling better, okay?"

I flop back down on the seat, and pick at a frayed part of the cushion cover. "We can't just leave him, with the Game after him, and he might freak out at the triad and if he doesn't they won't get that he's trying to redeem and he might end up in Limbo which is utterly awful and--"

"Shut up, Kai." He says it nicely enough, and passes me a flimsy little book that says _101 Travel Activities!_ In smaller print, _With special Magic Pen to see the answers!_

I spend the next hour doing the games, and then folding origami cranes out of the pages, with the last page turning into a single lonely frog. 

Kelly stops at an old house behind trees and walls. The door's locked, if not for long, and I follow them inside to rooms of battered furniture. "We can hang out here for a day or two," Jack says, "until you have a chance to recover. Someone else might stop by who has the Song of Healing, which would do us good. Plenty of time to figure out what to do next."

"We need to find Mannie. He could get dragged back to _Hell_ by the Game if they find him before we do." I sit down in a chair, hoping it won't collapse under me. There's graffiti scrawled into every wooden surface, riddles and tag lines and dates. One large drawing seems to be mocking Judgment, if the picture of notebooks being stolen from disapproving Seraphim is any indication.

Kelly drops to the rug, scowling. She's still wearing her Naughty Angel shirt, and I have to wonder at not getting pulled over with someone so young-looking driving. "Assuming Mannie even _wants_ to be found by us. He's not the most honorable sort ever..."

"He's lived in Hell for how long? Of course it's going to rub off on him. But he'll get better. Just needs time to learn." I wonder if I could carve a new design into the back of this chair. "Right, Jack?"

And I'd expected Jack, defender of the innocent and always willing to give someone with a sob story a fair shake, to join in. But he shakes his head. "I don't know, Kai. None of us is a Seraph. He could have told us he wanted to redeem just so that we wouldn't kill him when we met him. There are plenty of reasons to go Renegade that have nothing to do with a sudden change in moral fiber."

"You're being too hard on him. He just needs time." My Boss would never give up, not because of one or two setbacks. "What, are you two getting bored with the whole thing?"

"I wouldn't sully my honor for _boredom_ ," Kelly snaps.

"I didn't mean--"

"No, you didn't." All the anger she's been building up is gone now. "But... look, Kai. We've been hauling him around for weeks now, and he refuses to go to any Tethers, and this obsession with finding the one Archangel that _no one_ has been able to find? You've got to wonder. We couldn't find him when we picked you up, and we even stopped back at the motel in case he'd gone back there."

"He's trying to hide from the Game. Of course he won't go back to the motel." It's frustrating, and I wish people would stop thinking the worst of other people. This is how we end up with infighting and hostility even in Heaven. We're all on the same side. You'd think people could _realize_ that.

"If he's that worried about the Game, he'd be safer at a Tether than in hiding," Jack says. I don't know why they're trying to argue as if Mannie's been lying to us.

"Come on, he's a Renegade, and nearly as freaked about Judgment as he is about the Game. He's not going to run to an angelic Tether, no one with him, and expect a warm welcome." I leap to my feet. My feet regret it. "How is he going to find us if we're hiding?"

"How are we supposed to find _him_ if he's hiding? Face it, Kai, he has to track down some other angels to hang around with if he really wants to. Or visit a Tether like he should have in the first place."

I don't know why they're so angry. I don't know why it makes me so angry that they are. I find the bathroom, take a shower, hunt through a dresser in a dusty bedroom until I find a shirt that more or less fits me, to replace the blood-spattered one I was wearing.

When I get back to the living room Kelly and Jack have pulled out another deck of cards, and they're playing another pointless game involving money they stole from someone. "Want me to deal you in?" Jack asks.

"No thanks." I need to get out, go somewhere, do something. Anything but sitting here trying not to yell at people who are my friends, and think they're doing the right thing. They just don't get it. "Is the car unlocked?" I want my piccolo, I want my bagpipes, I want to be back home where I'm supposed to be teaching the advanced class their parts for the recital. I even want my computer back, and I don't _like_ my computer.

I want to find Mannie and make sure he's okay, and do something creatively deadly to that Calabite.

"Nope. You going somewhere? Might not want to drive very far. Tags could come up as stolen."

"I'll walk," I say. "I need coffee." Which is such a partial truth that Adala would be glaring at me right now, but none of us here is Seraph.

Pulling out the tune of coffee shops from the Symphony raises my mood a little. The house we're hiding in is in a dingy part of town, so I walk for a few miles before I find the place I'm looking for. I'd run, but my chest still hurts, even if the blood's clotted. All that's left in my pockets is change from the cash Tatnai gave me, but it's enough to get me basic coffee with unlimited refills.

The place is nearly deserted, a bored barista behind the counter playing with her cell phone when she thinks no one is watching. I sink down in a soft chair at the back with my cup of coffee, try to figure out what I'm doing in the middle of I-don't-know-where. I don't like losing my bearings like this; it feels wrong to not know quite where I am, though I'm sure I could get home if I needed to.

The Symphony tells me how, and I shudder. It's a temptation to walk out now, hitch a ride, find a Tether and beg some cash for the trip back home. It would be easy, it would be movement, I want to do it, I want to forget this whole mess and go back to where I belong.

No. Damn ambiguity back down to Hell where it belongs, I can almost wish I were a Seraph to tell the Truth of the matter. I drink my coffee. I will wait right here until I figure it out.

Five refills on the coffee. The barista leaves to be replaced by another, this one a college-age man who hasn't shaved recently. The sun sets, the place fills with college students and their laptops. I still haven't figured out what's going on, or what I should do about it.

Life used to be so simple. Dance, cook, encourage, smack down the occasional demon who tried poking around in my area, do the odd chore or investigation for friends. I guess it's in the nature of the Wind to shake people out of their ruts, but I liked my rut. Ruts come from wheels passing over them a thousand times, right? And that's what I was doing, orbiting my job, doing what I'd been told to do. It was working. Now I'm doing I don't know what, and the people who asked me to help aren't sure I was supposed to do it in the first place.

"Hey," Mannie says. "Want to drive?"

If I were my usual self, I could spin around him in a bright circle of flame. I settle for a hug. "How did you--"

"Later," he says, and drags me outside, barely giving me a chance to leave my mug on the counter. "I'm parked down the street," he says. "Are you okay? You're limping..."

"Just a run-in with a Calabite," I say. "I'll get better. But I'm going through shirts like crazy. Mannie, where have you been? I was starting to worry..."

"Relax," he says. "Isn't that what you keep telling me?" And oh, his car, it's a lovely shiny convertible, sporty and sleek and midnight blue and, um, parked along a red-painted piece of the curb in front of a fire hydrant, but no buildings are burning at the moment, so I think that's okay. I'm in the driver's seat before he can give me the keys.

"I'm glad you were listening," I say, but I'm not sure I could listen to anything right now. I've been sitting in that coffee shop too long, and the caffeine racing through my system wants to go, go, go. I oblige it. I passed an interstate overpass on the way here, and I'm doing 80 by the time I reach the on-ramp.

I settle down in a comfortable 85, passing from whichever direction feels comfortable. I could drive forever. It's just as well that the gas tank will remind me to stop. "So how'd you find us?" I have to raise my voice to be heard over the wind. Mannie looks as composed as I've ever seen him, sunglasses on and clothes arranged neatly. The very model of a hotshot computer whiz out for a drive in an expensive car.

"Song of Affinity," Mannie replies.

"In that case, what took you so long?" I can prove it to Kelly and Jack, now. He came back, went out of his way and came out of hiding to find us again. How could he not be serious about this? If he was making things up, he would've ditched while they were out that one night and he was alone in the motel room.

"Had to pick up a car. I can't get them as easily as the Windies manage," Mannie says. "So I called in a few favors." He actually grins at me, it's not at all like the way Jack does, but it's good to see. "It goes something like this: 'I notice you have twelve cars in your possession at the moment. Would you mind parting with one? And maybe all of the Essence you have on you.' Works remarkably well when someone owes you."

"It's a _nice_ car," I say. Nothing handles like my motorcycle back home, but for a car this has the most lovely response to my every want. Someone in Lighting must be behind the making of these things. I can't even hold the Geas-yanking against Mannie, not when he probably got it from someone in Theft who should under no circumstances be allowed to own such a beautiful car.  
 I hit 105, distracted by the conversation, and the engine's still purring as happily as it was at 30. I think I'm in love. "Where do you want to go tonight?"

"I don't know." Mannie tilts his seat back, watches the sky go by overhead. "Tell me, Kai. Have you ever known someone who successfully redeemed? I mean... knew them before and after, not just hearing from an angel that they'd been something else before."

"Oh, sure. A few, even." I search through my stories for one that'll be appropriately reassuring. The one about the Habbalite who tried to blow up a Flowers Tether, got jumped by all of us who were having a barbecue there, and ended up tied up in a gardening shed for a few months until he calmed down probably isn't the best example. "There was this one Shedite, actually, who was hanging out around where I live, and it's a Kyriotate now. Of Children, which isn't where I would have expected it to end up, but you can't always predict what someone will want to do as an angel based on what they had to do as a demon."

"A Shedite? That seems...unusual."

"He fell in love." I take a turnoff to another highway, going I don't know where, though I'd be able to figure it out if I pulled up the map in my head to check on the highway's number. "I'm not sure how, or why, or why _then_ and never before, but he did."

"With an angel?"

"Nah, with a woman it was riding. Single mom, two kids, teacher at the local high school. She was a lovely woman, I can't be surprised that it loved her like that." Wind in my hair, running across my arms, until the ache in my chest is something insignificant. It's too bad Jack and Kelly aren't with us; they'd love this.

"So it...fell in love with her. And then what?"

"Well, it still had to corrupt people, but it didn't want to do anything to _her_. So it started jumping around to people around her, and convincing them to do things for her that they weren't supposed to. Extra favors, giving her things for free, stuff like that." I'd first noticed something was weird myself when the chair of the board at the time, a stolid old man who would sooner cut off his own leg than bend policy, had arranged a special discount to let the woman's son take ballet lessons. "I guess it justified that as corrupting everyone else around her, though it wasn't being that _corrupt_ , as such."

"Can't stand Shedim. It's hard to imagine one of those... Well. Loving anything at all."

"Strange things happen. Maybe it had been changing all along, and it found her at the right moment when it was ready for the change." We're far enough away from the city to see the stars above, a million pinpricks of light. I'd like to visit another star, some day, if I could ever reach one. I'd have to pack something for the trip to keep from being bored. "Anyway, it decided to convince the instructor of this class I was assisting with to let her son jump ahead in levels, even though the kid hadn't taken a preliminary course. And it decided the most subtle way to do this would be to have the assistant decide this was a good idea, so it tried to jump into me, and, well, bounced."

"That must've been a surprise. And from there...?"

"Oh, you know how it goes. Came up with reasons to interact with the woman, and had some other local friends do so too. Even a few hours' observation was enough to show that it was acting pretty weird for a Corruptor. Took a few weeks, by which point it was starting to get dissonance from not corrupting anything at all, because it wanted to, well. Stay with her." I've always hated Shedim, more so than most demons for the way they break the insides of people, but there was something weirdly endearing at the time about one that just...didn't want to leave someone's mind, because it liked that mind so much. I'm not sure if its obsession could count as love, not at that point, but it was close enough to give us something to work with.

"And it redeemed."

"Yup. It was terrified, and it didn't want to lose the ability to stay inside the woman's mind with her, but we convinced it that this would be better for her in the long run, and for it as well. And now it's Kyrio-ing all over the place, working for Christopher." I take an off-ramp and spin around over the overpass and back onto the highway again, back the way we came, only somewhat running one of the red lights, which turns red right as I pass under it and thus doesn't count. "I think it's working at an elementary school in the same state, though I haven't seen it in years. Last I heard it had met up with the woman in question after she died, back in Heaven. I hope that's working out for them. I know some Superiors can be unreasonable about relationships between angels and blessed souls, which seems unfair to me."

"It would," Mannie says, "considering who you work for." He's lost his grin. I'd like to find a way to bring it back, but I suspect this would involve getting rid of the Game, which is kinda beyond the scope of my abilities. "I don't suppose you know any, ah, redeemed Lilim."

"Not myself, no. There...aren't that many." Honest to Litheroy truth, that, but he deserves that much out of me. "I don't think that many try, to start with, and, um."

"Yes, and the Game goes out of its way to prevent it from happening, and it's said that it's not possible at all, and Lilim are selfish to start with. It's not like this is a surprise to me, Kai."

"No, but it doesn't seem fair. Oh, and _don't_ you go on about entropy again," I add, before he can open his mouth, "because that just gets all depressing, and I have had _enough_ of depression for the day."

"That would explain why I found you sitting. In a chair. Came as something of a shock, that." He chuckles briefly, more to himself than at me. "And I know from shocks."

"Yeah. Electricity's your thing, right?" He'd do well with Lightning. They're the sort of people who can get a car running after it's had a fence pole stuck through it, or would critique the wiring in a motel room.

"Mm. Yes." He tilts his head further up towards the stars. "When I was younger and more arrogant, I was gunning for the Word of Electricity."

"I, um, get the impression that anyone with that Word doesn't last long, especially around Lighting Servitors."

"Well, no. More arrogant, as I said. That was before I'd ever lost Forces, and I'd been growing in power for a while. Thought I could take on anything... But then the Russian Revolution came, and I learned better." This smile has a touch of bitterness to it. "Loss is a speedy teacher. I'm not so foolish as to try for anything that _visible_ these days."

"If you were up for a Word that powerful once, how did you end up hitchhiking on the highway?" When I used to drive around back in the sixties, there were hitchhikers everywhere, hippies and runaways and college students on break, everything from whim to desperation. I've had plenty of interesting conversations with hitchhikers in my time. Don't see them so often anymore, not even on this cross-country trip and in good weather. I wonder what happened. Was it just a national fad? "Epiphany, change of heart..."

"Betrayal," Mannie says. "A subordinate of mine double-crossed me, managed to pin the blame for a major project failure on me while taking the credit for my own project just before I was about to present it to--ah, about to present it. Over the course of a few hours I found myself losing control of the entire situation. It was...not a pleasant realization. At least I realized what was happening before worse arrived." He takes off his sunglasses. The better to see the stars, or maybe he's tired of wearing them. I'd rather be able to see where I'm going than not. It must be a Lilim thing. "I broke my Heart and ran, and found myself trying to get as far from where I'd jumped to Earth as possible as quickly as possible, with no resources and not much clue as to what I was doing."

It's a personal question, but especially after what Jack and Kelly have been saying, I want to know. He seems to be in as good of a mood as he's likely to get while he's still being chased around by the Game. "So why did you decide you wanted to redeem?"

He's quiet for so long I start wondering if I've offended him, and miss the exit to the city we'd started at, and pass it completely. I can turn around later; the gas gauge is only at half empty. "When I realized that the car I'd been picked up by held two angels," he says. "Given the choice between ending up in Limbo, or running again wounded and having annoyed both sides of the War in short order, redemption suddenly seemed far less ridiculous an option."

It doesn't hurt as much as I expected to hear that. "And now?"

A brief sigh that I can barely hear over the wind. "I don't know, Kai. I get the impression that redemption works only for sincere candidates, and sincerity isn't something I do well. But... Renegades have a short life expectancy. Especially Lilim. Especially Lilim who have been seen in the company of angels."

"The Boss will know what to do. Even if," I swallow and keep my eyes on the road, "even if that's not why you first asked to see him. If you're ready, he'll know. If you're not, he'll be able to tell you what to do in the meantime."

"You believe that, don't you."

"Of course." It's a silly question for him to ask, but people say a lot of silly things when it comes my Boss. I'm probably just as clueless when it comes to other Superiors. "We should probably swing over and pick up Jack and Kelly. Though I'm not sure where we'll _fit_ them." There's no way I'm giving up this car, short of another crash, and even then I'd start by asking Mannie if he could fix it. "They can get another car and follow along. Jack's a good driver, he'd be able to, okay, not keep up, but catch up when we stop for gas."

"Or we could keep going. Four's quite a crowd when it comes to moving inconspicuously, and the Game knows that the two of them have been with me. If it's just the two of us, there's less chance of being spotted before we can find Eli." He slips his sunglasses back on, returns his seat to its full and upright position. Must remember to get lessons in how to fly a small aircraft, some time. Or a large aircraft. Now those go _fast_. "We're not going to be able to out-gun the Game, so we're going to need to out-run them and out-think them."

"No one's better than Windies for running," I point out, but he does have something of a point. I like him better when he's in a good mood like this, and honest. If he has to spend another week around Kelly and Jack being suspicious at him, he's likely to go sulky again.

"I have complete confidence in your ability to get us where we need to go," he says. "We'll travel faster and less conspicuously together, and it'll distract the Game if they see Jack and Kelly running around somewhere that we're not. They've played their part by now, right? And it's not like Windys really do subtle." He pulls the motel notepad out from under his jacket. "I've written out the logical proof for this, if you wanted to take a look..."

"No, no, you have a point," I say. Besides, it's a bad idea for me to read things while going this fast. "I'd better leave them a message, though. There's, mm." Where am I? Ah, yes. Right _there_. "Creation Tether about a seventy miles from there. I'll leave them a message, they can pass it to some Windies, it'll get to the right place soon enough." I seem to be doing a lot of message-leaving of late. I ought to brush up on my writing skills; it's so much harder to convey what I mean when I'm not in front of the person I want to say it to. "Someone there might know where the Boss is supposed to show up next." Not that any of the rumors have panned out so far, and for all I know he's spending the summer in Australia, but I don't know what else to try. When he wants to be found we'll run into him, right?

"It sounds like a good plan, as these things go. Or at least better than some I've heard." I've gotten worse compliments than that, so I'll take it the way he means it.

This highway is nearly empty; I floor the gas and watch the speedometer to see how fast I can go. Zoom! It's not quite a motorcycle, but I could be convinced to give up motorcycles for a car like this. A bit harder to hide behind trees near a road when waiting to jump some nefarious demonic type, but I could work around that, I'm creative. The car's getting a touch skittish on curves at these speeds, but I bet I could fix that with--no, wait, I'm no mechanic. I bet I could find someone who could fix it, though. "Hey, Mannie. Did you specialize in any particular type of tech? I mean, beyond the electricity thing. Mechanical stuff, computers..." The car stops accelerating at 123, probably a built-in safety measure. Pity, but I bet someone could fix that too.

"I don't do computers." Now that's a tone of wounded pride if I've ever heard it. "Idiot machines doing all the thinking for people... Before computers came along, there was serious research going on into the things you could _build_ , what you could do with sheer power. These days everyone just wants to hack into systems or fiddle with miniaturization. No style to it, none at all. All this typing away without the patience to delve into the guts of a machine and see what makes it hum."

Yeah, he's going to get along just fine with the Lightning guys, assuming he doesn't meet the computer ones first. "So, tell me. Just how much faster could you make this car go, given the right tools and enough time?"

That analysis gets us all the way to the Tether. Complete with him scribbling out schematics to wave in front of me. And he says _I_ never shut up.

I've never been to this Tether before, but I've heard enough about it from others that it's like driving up to the house of an old friend. For a minor Tether, it gets a lot of good press from other Creationers, though Adala got a very exasperated tone the one time I mentioned it when my triad was visiting. The parking lot is full, but I find a spot in the back that's just been vacated. "We're walking from here?" Mannie asks, as I turn the car off. What a pretty little car it is.

"No, this is the place." I search my pockets, and frown. "I spent all my money on coffee. Do you have any cash for the cover? I can get in without if needed, it'll just take longer."

"Sure, I have--Kai, this is _strip club_. Judging by the name and the sign outside, anyway."

"Yes, and?" The bouncer is exceedingly polite, and checks both of our IDs before letting us in. Inside, the stage is well-lit, and the opening notes of "Black Velvet" have just begun to play, though no one is on the stage.

The room's packed, so I can only find us a table at the back up against a wall. By the time we sit down the dancer's hit the stage, obviously female with her top off. Sometimes I wish humans didn't spend so much time dressed in clothing, if they're going to be all obsessive about what bits people have. It would make it easier to tell who's what without trying to memorize all the weird ways that culture, class, and age combine when dictating what each sex should wear.

"Aren't places like this usually Tethers of Lust?"

I roll my eyes. "Come on, Mannie, why should the devil get all the good strip clubs? Look." I point at the stage, because he's barely been paying attention. "She's got great form, she's having fun, and all of these people here? Are here to watch women dance. Men too, but that's on Thursdays, if I recall correctly. And it's not like Creation has a problem with people enjoying the aesthetics of a body in motion." The woman on stage executes a move that throws her long hair everywhere, like a veil, and it's a pretty enough move that I'll have to remember to see if I can incorporate it into some of the pieces I'm working on back home. It's something of a limitation to need a dancer with hair to her waist for the part, but dance parts are always full of needs and limitations. 

"But it's a _strip club_."

"You're really not getting over that, are you?"

"Not any time soon, no."

"Hey, as long as we're on the same page about this."

Mannie's more interested in schematics than the dancers, so I let him scribble away on his notepad, much as I think he's missing out by not watching. I'm happy enough with what mechanical things do, so I guess it's good that someone finds them fun to look at, but it's not my type of art. After the second dancer I order drinks from a circulating waitress, and spend the third set admiring the combination of caffeine and alcohol in Kahlua. I've heard there's such a thing as caffeinated soap; I'll have to look into it.

"I thought you were going to leave a note," Mannie says, more sourly than the situation warrants. "Are we going to be here all night?"

"I have an old friend who dances here. I want to see if she's on tonight, before heading out without saying hello." More precisely, I want to see her dance. Even as a kid she showed serious talent for dance, and the sort of grace that would make an Ofanite proud.

"Angel?"

"No, though she's a sweetheart. Soldier. She dances at the local RenFaires sometimes too, but I think she wears more clothing when she does those performances." And that's her just coming up on stage, all bounce and bright smile, entirely genuine. Mannie looks up for a moment, goes back to his scribbling. I guess you can take the Lilim away from Vapula, but you can't take the Vapulan out of the Lilim. Not right away.

I don't recognize the song, but it's fast, and so is she. All energy and swirl, very different from the sullen little girl I met over a decade ago. Some of those moves are the ones I taught her, some are standard improv, and at least one I'm pretty sure she made up herself. As the music fades and she heads out to collect tips, I stand up. "Back in a minute," and I'm working my way up to the front, slowly enough to not distract her while she's still dealing with appreciative watchers.

Tiffy catches sight of me before I'm quite to the front, and nearly knocks over a customer on her way towards me. "Kai!" And I'm spun around in a hug so tight I can barely breathe. "You finally came. I know, I know, you're on your way to something important, but I'm so glad you stopped by." She drags me back to a room behind the stage, beaming wildly at the woman who's reading a battered Jane Austen book there. "Moe, this is Kai, my old ballet teacher, from back when I was a kid. I've told you about him, right?"

"You certainly have." Moe stands up to take my hand, when I can extract it from Tiffy's grasp. "It's so good to finally meet you. I'm Brigid, the Seneschal of this place. What brings you to our corner of the world?"

"It's...a bit complicated." Much as I'd like to give the full story, this probably isn't the time or place to get other people involved in this. "Windies stop by here occasionally, don't they? I need to get a message to some friends of mine, I had to run off in a hurry and I don't want them to worry..."

"Easy enough." She waves another dancer through the room. "Did you want us to get them the message immediately, or with a bit of a delay?"

"As soon as possible. I don't want them to stress. Oh, and if my triad comes by--I'd better leave them a message too."

"Judgment is looking for you?" Now both she and Tiffy are looking worried, which isn't what I intended. I wish triad references didn't keep provoking that reaction. A lot of Creationers get all stressed about being visited by internal security so often, which I can understand, though it would probably go better if everyone involved could relax and stop getting so defensive. But then, it's stressful to have the Boss never stopping by. He never calls.

"It's nothing big, honest." Well, for certain values of big. But it's not like I'm doing anything wrong. "I had to run out of town in a hurry to help some Windy friends, you know it's not like they'll wait, and so I missed my last appointment. I left Adala and the rest a note in San Francisco, but just in case they didn't get that one, it's a good idea for me to send them another. I'll be checking in with them the instant I'm done with this project, honest."

"Don't go getting into some sort of trouble," Tiffy says. She hugs me tighter, until I can barely work around her to write out my notes. "I'd be upset if anything happened to you."

"You don't need to worry. Worst comes to worst, I lose another vessel, and I'll wake up in a few days back at my Heart." Which would be awfully inconvenient at this point, as I'm on the last vessel the Boss gave me before he went off to work on his big project, but it's hardly the kind of tragedy corporeal death is for a human.

First, Kelly and Jack. I chew on the end of the pen, then work it out, a bit awkwardly, because I'm not so good with words:

_Dear Jack and Kelly. Just a note to let you know that I'm fine. Met up with Mannie, and he's right, you guys have other things to do, and we'll travel better with two. Besides, the car will only seat two, and it's a really nice car. I hit 123 on the way over, and Mannie says he can make it go faster with some work. So don't worry about either of us. Thanks, Kai._

After a moment's consideration, I add,

_Jack, would you pay the rent for me? Or if you can't, would you please call Sujan and ask him to pick up my bagpipes and my notebooks before the landlord dumps all my stuff? Thanks._

I fold the paper in half and write Jack's name on it in its proper Angelic script. "This one is for the Windies," I say. "I guess just about any of them would be able to get it to the right people." And then, the trickier note.

_Dear Adala, Nomikos, and Dedan. I'm sorry I missed you in Seattle; I meant to meet up with you in the Creation Tether there like I said in the message I left with the chair of the board, but I'm not sure you got that message, and I didn't manage to get to that Tether before I had to leave town. I have some work I need to finish before I can head back home, but I'll let you know as soon as I get back in so that I can tell you all about it. Aside from having the Game after us, I'm perfectly safe, and I'm trying to be responsible and seeing this job through to the end like you always told me I should do. Jack and Kelly can tell you all about what's going on if you need more details. Hugs, Kai._

No, this demands another addendum. In very small letters at the bottom of the sheet of paper I add:

_P.S. If you see Eli, would you tell him I'm looking for him? He probably knows, but he's also really busy, so he might find it easier to just tell you where I can meet up with him, or if I should do something else. Thanks!_

This one I stick Adala's name on, since she's the one in charge of the triad. "And I'd better get going," I say, "though it was good to see you again, Tiffy."

"One more set," she says, "just stay a little longer?" And how can I say no to that?

She dances beautifully. I wish I were up there dancing along.


	12. An Intermission With Judgment And Wind

Adala received the note from an Elohite, who waited politely for dismissal before leaving her office. She waved it away as soon as she had confirmed that it did not know where the message had come from. Once she'd read through the note, transcribed by someone with a much neater hand than the original author, she sent for the rest of her triad.

Nomikos arrived first; he'd been pacing outside in the hallway ever since they'd returned, though he preferred to call it "observing the local residents for signs of dishonor." He'd just finished reading the note by the time Dedan loped in. "This isn't good," Nomikos said. "What's the Truth of the matter?"

Adala coiled about on herself, her middle left eye twitching. "He's written nothing he believes to be untrue, he's concealing the identify of someone though I don't know who, and there's all sorts of ineffability clouding the last section, which worries me."

Dedan read through, and sighed. "I wish I had attuned to him... But how could we know he would run off like this? He's been so responsible! No relationships with humans that overstepped the boundaries of appropriate care and respect, a properly Ofanite appreciation for movement, enthusiasm for battling the forces of evil, remaining steadfast in the task appointed to him..."

"It's hanging out with Windies that did this," Nomikos said, and they all agreed to the Truth of his statement. "I suggest that we speak to the two referenced in his note, as they may have enough details that we can divine how much trouble Kai is in."

"But we knew he was with them already," Adala said, frowning. "If he's no longer traveling with them, who is the someone that he does not refer to by name, or with any description? It's unlike him to deliberately conceal something from us. He's always been forthright."

"He no doubt believes he has good reasons for not revealing everything," Nomikos said, and they agreed to consider the implications of the matter while searching for the two Servitors of Janus who might have the information they needed.

Dedan found Kelly sitting in Novalis's garden, a sulking black-winged blot in the shade. After ascertaining her identity, he sat down beside her. "You seem dissatisfied, Virtue," he said, in what he hoped was not an accusatory tone.

"Lost another vessel," said the Malakite, her feathers fluffing up in anger, "and my Superior said that if I couldn't take care of them better I ought to learn how before he'd give me another one." Her hands twisted up clumps of grass. "And my friend is still in Trauma. No doubt he'll wake, but it'll be days yet."

This was unexpected, and did not sit well with Dedan. He shook his mane and asked, "Which friend was this, and how did you find your vessels destroyed? No doubt in the service of Heaven..."

"His name is Jack, and he's a Mercurian. They're not meant for fighting against those sorts of odds, Mercurians. He should have run for help and let me handle the situation. I'm made for throwing myself against death." She smiled wryly. "Though it may be true that of late I've been throwing myself against it a little too hard. Maybe we both should have run."

"You encountered demons, then?"

"Yes. Three--no, four, because there was a Shedite there, though it didn't join in the fight. The two of us were outmatched. We should have retreated to get help, rather than trying to handle it ourselves."

"It is honorable to acknowledge your own mistakes," Dedan allowed, for he always worried when a Malakite began to doubt its actions in the fight against evil. "There is no dishonor in defeat when outnumbered."

"Should have been expecting it, though," Kelly said. She leaned her head back against the trunk of the tree, would not meet his eyes. "We knew the Game was tracking us, especially after the dust-up in Seattle, and it makes sense that after going down that hard once, they'd start sending out something tougher. We shouldn't have gone wandering out without being more careful, and we shouldn't have waited so long before looking."

A reliever approached them, a zippy little type that looked as if it had been spending far too much time in the company of Windies. It fluttered back a bit when it noticed Dedan, and frowned. "Message," it said, "for, oh, for you Kelly, except it's not, it's for Jack, but I thought you'd want to answer his mail while he's, oh, he's just out for a bit, I'm sure, but it's probably not urgent, so I can come back later. Or not? Or I can just leave it with him..."

"I'll take it," Kelly said, and accepted the message. She read through it, and stood up. "Kai, you idiot!" A few Flowers Servitors looked up at the outburst. Her hand grasped at her side as if she were expecting to grab a weapon from that area. "It's--if you will pardon me, sir, I must go speak to my Superior."

"Wait," Dedan said. And because she wasn't waiting, he paced alongside her, having no time to send for anyone else. "If it involves Kai, a particular Ofanite of Creation, then it's my business too."

She wore the look of any Servitor of Janus being asked to discuss recent activities in front of someone of Judgment. "He's a good kid," she said, even though Dedan was sure the Ofanite was older than she was. "Maybe a little light in the Ethereal Forces, if you know what I mean. But nothing that Judgment would need to worry about. I just need to...track him down. Have a chat with him. And, hey, look at the time, I'd better keep moving. Nice talking to you."

"Kelly, be reasonable," Dedan said, wishing Adala were here to be stern, or Nomikos to address the Malakite in words another of his Choir would understand. "If Kai is in trouble, don't you think we want to help?"

She spun around. "I have no doubt you'd like to find _some_ reason to haul another one of Eli's kids back to Heaven on charges, just because he didn't realize any more than we did--" She stopped, and spread her wings. "I need to speak with my Superior promptly. There are tasks left unfinished on Earth that I ought to be attending to. No doubt if you have official business with me, you'll let me know." And she was away in the sky before he could compose a suitable response.

Dedan looked down, and saw a crumpled note left behind on the ground. Perhaps God was looking out for even Eli's wayward children, today. He picked the note up and took it back to Adala.

Adala waited for Nomikos to join them before opening the note to read it. Then read it again. "He's traveling with _who_?" Her voice had taken on a shrill edge neither of them had heard recently, and Nomikos gently took the note away to look it over.

"Who's Mannie?" he asked, frowning. "This does sound like Kai..."

"Renegade. Renegade from Vapula. Renegade _Lilim_ of Vapula." Two of Adala's eyes had begun twitching, producing an odd effect when trying to meet her gaze. "He's...what is he _thinking_?"

"Well," said Dedan in a reasonable tone, seeing that Nomikos was already starting to look unreasonable too, "Kai probably believes the Renegade in question is redemption material, and is attempting to find Eli to discuss the matter with the Archangel he feels most comfortable with."

"Lilim!" It was never a good sign when the Seraph was reduced to sentence fragments.

"It's not like Lilim never redeem," Dedan said, though he had his doubts about this one. A properly repentant demon would have turned himself in to the nearest Tether promptly, without all this running about.

"But...Eli!"

"We do know that Kai's been worried about his Superior of late, though he doesn't like to admit it, even to himself. I suspect this excursion is partly an excuse to find Eli again."

"But...the Game!"

"Mmm, yes." Dedan frowned. "That does make things more complicated. Especially with a Lilim involved, they'll be pulling out the heavy guns. That would explain those demons we met back in Seattle, right when the Windies were leaving. Poor Kai must have run into them the wrong way himself, but it sounds like he's back on his feet."

"Kai!"

"Needs rescuing, yes." Dedan and Nomikos hauled Adala away from the growing crowd of people trying not to look like they were watching a Seraph of Judgment have a complete meltdown in a public area. "We'll figure out where he's heading next, meet him there, take both of them into custody, and decide what to do with the Renegade once we've gotten Kai taken care of. He's probably confused, and doing what he thinks is best."

"But...Lilim!"

"You said that already, Most Holy."


	13. In Which That Which One Asks For Is Not Always That Which One Desires

I'm running out of leads, and we're running out of time. I'm not used to planning ahead, or trying to stay under the radar of someone else when not in my home territory. And Mannie, well, he's great with the mechanics of things, but I don't think he's had much practice in this sort of thing either. It doesn't help that he keeps coming up with ideas that are--well, it's not like I can object to illegal actions on the basis of them being illegal, but he's not good yet at thinking about what things you shouldn't do. And I'm not a Windy, to walk the fine line between chaos and wanton destruction, which means I'm not the ideal candidate to be forming his moral compass, here.

On the plus side, I'm seeing more of the country than I've ever seen before. Most of it at pretty high speeds. I can't think of a better way to travel, aside from the bit where several angry demons are, presumably, trying to find us, kill me, and drag Mannie off somewhere horrible.

Okay, so I can think of better ways to travel.

Mannie's been studying maps for the last few hours, atlases and state maps and maps of city streets. I don't know why he's bothering; I know how all the interstates connect and twist anyway, and I can figure out where we're going by feeling my way there through the way it calls in the Symphony. But then, I shouldn't be surprised that a demon would have control issues.

"If you take 63 at the next juncture, we'll cut a few miles off the trip."

"It's faster to stay on this highway for the moment." He's going to argue, I just know it. "Honestly. Ofanite, Mannie. When it comes to getting places, trust me on this."

He peers over an unfolded map at me. "And you've never been wrong?"

"I'm right more often than you can trust the maps. And the map isn't going to show you where there's construction, or a three-mile traffic jam because of an accident, or any of a hundred things that can make road choice more important than miles traveled." I swing off on the next edit for gas, coffee, and a chance to stretch my legs. I love the speed this car gets, but I'm starting to get tired of sitting down all the time. My feet want to keep moving, I want to spin in ways that a car can't allow. Why can't I dance while driving? The idea of an automotive ballet is absurd, but strangely alluring.

Mannie hands me a cup of coffee, just what I need. I suspect he's getting a Geas hook in every time I take the coffee, but at this point another one isn't going to matter. "Come on," he says. "Let's keep moving."

There's a pay phone near the pumps, but it doesn't ring.

Back in the car, Mannie stretches his legs out, takes a long chug of his coffee. "So," he says, "what's with you and phones?"

"What?" I nearly miss the turn, and have to make a left turn from the middle lane to compensate.

"Every time we stop at a place like this, you stare at the phones, like you're waiting for a call. Are you expecting your triad to give you a ring?"

"No, it's..." This isn't something I wanted to explain to anyone. But I'm trying to be a good example, and being honest is a step in that direction. "It's...just in case. In case the Boss calls."

Even with his sunglasses on, his expression is apparent, and I hate the way he's looking at me. I don't need anyone's pity. It's not like I've been wronged. Maybe I'm just too clingy. "You think he's going to call you at a random rest stop?"

"Back when he first put me on Earth. In my job." I don't know why it hurts so much to talk about this to him. I've always loved telling the triads about those times. "Before he had to go work on his big plan. He'd call, sometimes. Ask me to do something, or just to say hi and tell me, oh, that there was some author out that I ought to read, or a performance in town I'd want to watch, or even that someone else needed a little encouragement and maybe I could stop by and say hi. Not often, but, you know, every few months, once or twice a year. And it was always great to hear from him. But I, um. Kinda took it for granted. It was just the way he was. To call."

Mannie shivers, reminded of something he doesn't want to talk about. "And he stopped calling?"

"Yeah. The last time I heard from him was..." And this is the part that hurts the most. "You know, I can't remember what he'd said that time? It was another great call, and nice to hear from him, and of course he was busy and couldn't talk long but was still taking the time out for me, and...then, a few months later, three angels from Judgment show up to ask me all these pointed questions about when I last saw him. And I couldn't even answer their questions as well as I wanted because I'd been busy, I'd been doing things, I was doing what he _wanted_ me to do, and so..." This is a bad road to drive my thoughts down, so I grab my coffee and send them off towards the interstate of caffeine. "I don't know. Maybe he'll be finished and back tomorrow. Maybe it'll be another century. When you've been around for as long as he has, fifty years can't seem like a long time. For me, well, it's most of my life." And because the question hasn't occurred to me before and I'd like to change the subject, "How old are you, anyway? I know Lilim don't do the reliever thing..."

"Two hundred years old, give or take. I wasn't paying much attention to the date the first few decades, before I got out of Hell."

Older than me, Jack, and Kelly all put together. Younger than any of the angels in the triad that watches out for me. "You must have seen a lot."

"A fair amount. Most of it unimportant. After a while you learn to forget the boring details, the dialects no one speaks anymore, the skills no one uses... I've had no reason to drive a carriage in the last century, and being able to construct a deadly device out of gas lamps and horse harnesses is no longer useful."

"It sounds like fun, though." I'm already trying to build it in my head, flaming glass projectiles being slung about by straps and buckles and...whatever it is that one makes a horse harness out of. "Did you ever make one?"

"Once. Or...maybe twice. I don't recall." His seat tilts back until he's nearly horizontal. "How much longer until we get there?"

"Three hours. We should be coming up on it right around sunset. It's a--"

"Lovely time of day, yes. Do you ever stop admiring things long enough to figure out what they're good for?"

"Sometimes, when I'm about to hit people with them." Though I have no idea how to hit someone with a sunset. Maybe by taking a picture of it, developing the film, framing the picture, and using that? Seems like a roundabout way of doing things, but sometimes, for thematic reasons, it's worth going to a lot of trouble to find the right thing to hit a demon with. I once got to beat up an Impudite with a particular book in a very ironic manner, and it was extremely satisfying.

"Fair enough."

Right at sunset I start looking for parking on campus. The latest place I've had recommended to me is a little college with a great music program and, from what I'm told, a jazz band with a trumpeter who can improv like nobody's business. I wonder how hard it would be to add bagpipes to standard jazz pieces? Probably wouldn't blend in well, but then, you wouldn't think a tuba would go well with jazz either, and I've heard it done.

Most classes are over for the day, and the parking garage has plenty of spaces, though the lot right by the music building is packed. Somewhere deep inside the building a concert band is tuning up. The door to the building is unlocked, though no one is sitting behind the receptionist's desk.

"Wrong night for jazz band," Mannie says. He's found a schedule to read through. "They meet on opposite nights from concert band."

"He could be around anyway," I say, but my heart's not in it. It's silly to think this, but I keep believing that if he were around I'd be able to tell, that it would feel like something different than any of these places we've been to so far. The Boss can be as inconspicuous as he'd like, so why do I keep believing I'd know if he were nearby? Just because everything seems brighter and clearer and better when he's around, it doesn't mean I can look for that as a method to find my way back him again.

It would feel like quitting to not even check, now that we're here. I make my way down dim corridors to peer into empty practice rooms and classrooms. Music stands with no music on them look so lonely. "Hey, Mannie, you play any instruments?"

"A few centuries back, I was passable at the violin, but I stopped practicing once I left the Role that had required that skill." I've never tried any stringed instruments myself, but maybe I'll pick up one after I've mastered the bagpipes. I wonder how hard it would be to accompany oneself on a separate instrument, if only one needed breath... Of course, a Kyriotate could do about four instruments at once, and I've seen a few do so. I have to envy them that ability, even if I'd find body-jumping unnerving myself.

At the far end of the building from where the concert band practices, two wide metal doors stand next to a corkboard displaying all the random postings a music department gets, and a schedule. "Jazz band meets in here," I say, once I've found the entry on the schedule. "Last night, tomorrow night... but not tonight."

"This is pointless," Mannie says, and turns back the way we came, and then I'm slamming through the doors with him on top of me, a sound like someone's just returned the carriage on a manual typewriter. He's cursing, words I can't understand, that I don't want to understand. 

Halfway to the floor on my face I catch myself, kick back up, slam the doors shut behind us. Another bullet slams into the door, leaving a dent right next to my face. I will take the time to thank someone profusely for sturdy metal doors /later/, right now more important things on my mind. Latch the door and that's going to hold them, what, twenty seconds? If they don't just jump celestial and walk through, at that.

No windows. Several music stands, chairs, a lectern, a chalkboard... I could do some damage with any of these, but they're not going to provide much defense against guns. Um. My mind starts spinning like a wheel caught in a ditch. "Mannie?"

"I don't _know_." If I had more time I'd sympathize with the frustration of having, well, brain the size of a planet and nothing for it work with, though at least Mannie's never been as depressed as Marvin.

No more bullets hitting the door. That latch is...not going to last long. Cheap security, if one could call it security at all. At least they're not going celform yet.

I drag Mannie through the one last door in the room, into a music library full of filing cabinets and still, no windows. Slam the door shut, start pushing a filing cabinet in front of it. "Want to lend me a hand, here?"

"They're going to get through this." He's not quite blank-eyed yet, but he's getting there, and I need him to think for me, I can't figure this out on my own. I dance, I hit demons with things in a creative manner, I occasionally play the piccolo. Strategy is so very much not my strong point. At least he's helping me push.

"Yeah, but this will give us a minute to think, and you can come up with something clever to get us out of here." Please, Mannie, don't go into panic mode on me now, I hate losing vessels.

"They're going to have those..." He gestures vaguely, having lost the word for whatever he means. "They're going to drag me back and, and," and, great, he's now almost entirely lost it. I am not ready to deal with however many people are out there.

"Mannie, how many of them did you see?"

"Three?"

"...at least three. Right." I can hear the doors swing open in the other room. "And after last time probably no one easy, either." I manage to get four filing cabinets lined up in a wall two deep in front of the door. If they have a Calabite with them, this gives me, what, another thirty seconds. "Mannie." He's staring at the back wall, as if that's any help, so I grab his hand to at least get that much of his attention. "I don't know what to _do_. You're the smart one, here. Give me a plan, an idea, a suggestion, _something_ to work with. I need your help."

His eyes focus on me. "Call him."

"What?"

That sound behind us? Twenty seconds. I think that was the door. Two sets of filing cabinets to go. And I almost feel bad about putting all that sheet music in the way of a Calabite. It's not like college music departments are well-funded to start with.

"You still have a Superior. Invoke him."

"But... he doesn't come when I call!" And I have tried, back when my triad first politely asked so many years ago, again after we picked up that awful little talisman Mannie's still carrying, and he's...he's busy. He has more important things to deal with. I shouldn't be bothering him anyway.

"Do you have a _better plan_?"

"...right." Ten seconds. I have about three notes of Essence left, and it's not like they're going to do me much good if this doesn't work, so here's to hoping the Boss isn't caught up in something more important at the moment.

It would have been nice to say something witty or clever or at least elegant, but about all I can manage to think is

_HELP_

Between one blink and the next, I'm not in the room any more. And for half a second I'm terrified that he's just grabbed me and forgotten Mannie, that wasn't what I _meant_ , but--oh. A blank endless plain of grey sand in a sort of twilight, bubbles drifting by... The Marches. He's Kyrioing my vessel. Or someone is, anyway.

I hope he leaves a note or something when he's done, if it is him. I'd hate to have my first successful invocation in over fifty years be one where I don't even get to say hello. And...it hurts. Because I wanted to see him. But he's busy, and this is probably the most efficient way to do things, right? Get me out of the way, take care of things however he decides is best... Right.

It's a little odd to be myself again, instead of wearing a vessel. I haven't gone celestial on Earth in decades, and it's been a while since I've been in Heaven, where everything's set up to accommodate giant six-eyed snakes, winged lions, various humanoid types, Kyriotate masses, and, well, me.

I spend a minute or two spinning around over the sand. I don't see anyone else. I suppose ethereals would, by and large, be keeping out of the way, though I'm not a threatening force on this plane of existence. Any angels assigned to this place have their own duties, demons wouldn't be this far over near the--yup, I can see the tower off in the distance. 

I wonder how long the Boss is going to take down there. It would be rude to just pop into a bubble to see what's there, but sand is kinda boring.

The pull comes just when I'm three lines into a poem about willow trees, written into the sand. I don't really blink in this form, but it's much the same sensation, and--slam. Back in my vessel, staring at Mannie. Who's...not panicking any more. But giving me the most peculiar look.

"Hey," I say. "What happened?"

"I felt a great disturbance in the Symphony, as if four Gamesters suddenly cried out in terror, and were suddenly...ah. Covered in toffee."

The music library looks like a cyclone went through here. Janus would be proud. I step outside into the main room and--

"...that's a...um. One of those pools you can put above ground in your back yard."

"Yes." Mannie appears to have had more time to take this all in than I have. 

"Full of...toffee?"

"Apparently so, though I haven't actually _tasted_ it, so I couldn't say."

There's a ladder on the side, so I climb up and peer down inside.

"Yeah. Looks like toffee. But I only see three people in there." Two of them are still moving, but I'm not sure how long that's going to last. It's hard to breathe through toffee, and almost as hard to swim through it.

"Oh, well." Mannie gestures towards a corner of the room, and there's something sitting there, with a tuba stuffed over her head. "The line worked better that way..."

"I never took you for a Star Wars fan," I say, and drop back down to the floor. Too bad there aren't any security cameras in here; I would give so much for a video of what just happened.

"Required viewing. Don't ask. Please."

"Well," I say, licking the trace bits of toffee off my fingers, "that worked out surprisingly well. Did. Um. Did the Boss...say anything to you? Before he left?"

"I gave him back his--ah. I'm not sure it was his after all. But he said he would make sure it was taken care of properly." Mannie looks lost. I can't blame him. I feel about the same way. "And he told me..." He shakes his head. "I'll tell you some other time. But. Ah. Yes. This is for you."

It's a paper heart, like a little valentine, done from a sheet of paper out of Mannie's motel notepad. I open it up to read what's inside.

"Keep up the good work, kid."

There's nothing on the back. That's all that he had to say to me.

"He probably had important things to do, and not much time," Mannie says, and he's looking at me like he thinks I'm going to break down.

"No, no, I'm not upset," I say, and I'm not. "This is _great_." He took the time to leave me a note. He loves me, he thinks I'm doing a good job. I'm still his kid. "I was worried sometimes about this whole trip, that maybe I should have just stayed home, but...it's okay. I was doing the right thing." It's not quite a hug from the Boss, but it's as close as it comes from this distance. I could run for days on this alone. "I think we should call someone to come take care of the bodies before anyone in the college walks in. But they should leave the pool. You know that half the college pranks out there are bits left over from stuff Wind and Creation did..."

"Even the police car assembled on the roof of Caltech?" Mannie's holding a bit of paper in his hand, that I can't quite make out from over here. "Always wondered about that one..."

"Couldn't say, but I'll ask some Windies the next time I see them, in case they'd know." And because I can't contain my curiosity any longer, "What's that?"

"An origami frog," Mannie says. "I'm...not entirely sure why he gave it to me, before he left." And sure enough, it's another notepad sheet, folded up like a frog. The design doesn't look quite like the ones I can make, though. He hands it over to me.

"Oh, hey, look at this." Two bits of the frog are marked "pull" in small letters. I tug on those bits, and the whole thing snaps out, other bits folding under and around as it all pulls together. And now it's a neat little origami crane. "Cute! I need to figure out how to do that one." I hand it back to Mannie.

"Does it go back?" All the little pull bits are hidden now, tucked away somewhere inside. "No, it appears not." He holds it carefully in both hands, and I think it must mean something to him, because the Boss gave it to him special. But I don't know how the inside of Mannie's mind works, or what connections he's making.

"Did you get the answers you wanted from him?" I want to ask, will you go with me to a Tether now, will you actually try to redeem, but I don't want to ask those questions until I'm sure what the answers will be.

The doors to the music room burst open, and I'm just about to twitch in an oh, no, not again when I recognize the people coming in. Mannie twitches anyway, but then, he hasn't met them yet.

They look worried, but they shouldn't be, not at this point. "Adala!" I fling myself over there and hug the Seraph tightly. "I missed you guys so much. What brings you here?"

"Disturbance," Dedan says, eyeing Mannie in a disapproving manner. "And we were trying to find _you_ before anything happened to you--" He stops, and stares. "Is that a swimming pool?"

"Yeah, I'll explain in a minute. Hey! Mannie, this is Adala, Dedan, Nomikos. They work for Judgment, great guys, they stop in to check on me all the time. Guys, this is Mannie, he's, um..." I try to figure out the best way to explain this to them without causing more problems than I'm prepared to deal with.

"A Renegade Lilim," Adala says, her voice taking on the tone of Judgment from on high, "formerly of--"

"Don't say it!" The three of them look at me. "Just... it's a bad idea, okay?"

Adala nods slowly. "It is. Very well. We won't...mention the name of his former Superior."

"Good, good. Um." Mannie has gone all blank-faced and still again, the way he does when he's trying to think of where he can run. Which is bad, because these people aren't going to hurt him, and running would look bad.

"Is that _toffee_?" Nomikos asks. He's not staring at Mannie the way the others are, which I guess means he hasn't been pinging anything too dishonorable from him. A good sign. "And...why is there a swimming pool of toffee in the middle of this room?"

"Oh! Right. See, we were being jumped by a bunch of Gamesters, so I called for help, and the Boss dropped by and sorted everything out." It's like drinking hot chocolate--not the kind I make, granted--to be able to tell people that he's been here, and he's doing the right thing. I go all prickly inside when other angels start getting disapproving about my Boss. I mean, he's an Archangel. Of _course_ he knows what he's doing, even if we don't quite understand it.

"Ah. So the woman in the corner with the tuba on her head--" Nomikos smiles a little, as if he's appreciating the good work.

"His doing too, right."

"Mm. Nice job." Nomikos coughs, and straightens up. "We'll need to get all the details from both of you, for a full official report about having encountered Eli. As you know, the Most Just wishes to know all about his actions."

"Of course!" I know I'd be worried about my Boss if I knew what his big plan was, big enough to require all this time outside of Heaven. It's one of the reasons I'm just as glad he doesn't tell us the details. Makes perfect sense that Dominic wants to keep tabs on him, in case something goes wrong and he needs help.

Adala pins Mannie with one of her "I'm a Seraph" looks, the ones she pulls out when she thinks someone is going to lie to her. "Will you come peacefully with us to a Tether?"

"Certainly." Mannie puts the little origami crane away inside his jacket, and dips his head politely to her. "I would be, ah." A small wry smile. "Terrified to do so. I can't quite claim delighted."

Adala's shoulders drop slightly, as if she's disappointed in the answer. "Do you consider yourself a candidate for redemption?"

"I don't know," Mannie says. He spreads his hands. "Not being sure of the criteria for a successful redemption, I can hardly guess at my suitability, much less calculate my chances. But I'm given reason to believe I ought to look into the matter."

Adala blinks a few times, and mutters something under her breath that I can't quite make out, but sounds surprisingly like "Blessed Superior fuzz!"

"You shouldn't run off without telling us," Dedan says gently, and thumps me on the shoulder. "We were worried about you."

"I'll call first next time, or at least leave a note," I say. "Promise. It was careless of me to just run off without knowing how long I was going to be gone." If I can get back home by tomorrow, I'll be there in time to help everyone with the dress rehearsals before the recital, and make sure Sally Fieldman is confident enough in her part that she won't have a panic attack on stage. And I hug Dedan, because Cherubim need hugs too, just like everyone else. "Thanks for coming to find me. If the Boss hadn't shown up, we would have been in really serious trouble, there. I was so glad to see you guys show up."

"Always," Dedan says. "Now let's get you back home."


	14. In Which I Make Myself Useful

I hang up the phone, an antique rotary model, with the usual mixture of cheer and guilt that comes from his calls. 

There's no one else in the office, an illusion of privacy for my conversation. If pressed, they would admit to the surveillance mechanisms set up here: hidden cameras, microphones, a thousand ways to make sure nothing happens in this Tether without their knowledge. But it would be impolite to press, so we maintain these fictions for the sake of civility and comfort.

Still, they would admit these things, if pressed. I'll grant them that much honesty. I can't hold security against anyone in a war, even if it's a war as hidden as the one they're in.

If it's a war, what does that make me? A deserter, I suppose. Which to them is marginally better than being one of the enemy. I'll take what bonus points I can get. They're hard to come by.

I close the door behind me on the way out, and Zif looks up at the sound, as if she didn't already know I was there. "Good conversation? That was shorter than usual." Her current Role is of an on-site company counselor, and she plays the part of psychologist so well I can only imagine she's done this sort of thing many times before.

"Yes," I say, and because she would ask anyway if I didn't continue, "Kai's busy at the moment. It's the night before the recital and he's working late on making sure the set is ready on time. So he couldn't talk for long."

"But he called anyway?"

"He always calls." He hasn't forgotten a day yet, though he did once call at three in the morning, apologizing profusely for the late hour. And in every call, not the slightest hint of concern over whether I may have tried to run off, or backslid. He just...wants to talk with a friend. It's strange, every time.

"You still feel guilty." She's always the perceptive one. I would call her Elohite, if I didn't know her to be a Cherub; she's reserved, precise, neutral when the situation calls for it.

"This isn't your office," I say. Will she take the hint?

"But the both of us are here," she says. Apparently not. Since it's not as if I could outrun a Cherub, even if I had a reason to do so, I sit down beside her on the couch. The lounge is reasonably private; the only people authorized to enter this wing of this floor of this strange little research laboratory I had never heard of before, despite many a security clearance, are people who know about the Tether. About me, and isn't that its own uncomfortable feeling?

"Yes," I say. "I feel guilty. Is this a good sign that I acknowledge my sins, or a bad sign in that I haven't overcome them?"

"Why do you feel guilty when talking to him? You haven't done anything wrong to him," she says. Always the reasonable one. 

I put on my sunglasses. It's a sign of weakness, and we both know it, but it gives me some small comfort, even as a useless gesture. "It's not anything I've done to him," I say. The worst I ever did to him was tangle him up in the mess that is my current life, and I don't think he would hold that against me. "It's what I've done before."

"Why should speaking to him make you feel guilty about those things?"

"Because he doesn't know." He's always so careful to not bring up subjects he thinks might upset me. It would be exasperating if it weren't endearing, which describes much of his personality right there.

"You think he would think worse of you if he knew, and so you feel guilty for keeping such things a secret."

"Yes. No. It's--" I'm out of words often these days, left with futile gestures. But it behooves me to do my best under the circumstances, trying though they may be. "He treats me as if the beginning of my existence was when I met him. As if the worst thing I'd ever done was be a demon, with that something I couldn't help and which shouldn't be held against me." I stand up because it's easier to talk, sometimes, when I'm moving. Kai must be rubbing off on me; I never used to pace before. "But he knows how old I am, and who I worked for. He _must_ know what sorts of things I've done. So how can he not care?"

She sits there quietly, hands folded on her lap. "Has it occurred to you that he may have forgiven you for such things already?"

"He can't...take away my responsibility for them. They're my damn sins to atone for."   
"That's not what forgiveness is," she says. Zif is never upset by anything I say. That does become exasperating on occasion, when I wish someone would shout back, or tell me that I was wrong, that I should have known better, that it's all my fault. But it's not in her nature to say those sorts of things. "Would you be happier if he did hold your past actions against you?"

"No." She doesn't say anything. Damn her pointed silences. "Maybe. But... He fully expects me to redeem. He believes that I have it in me to be an, an angel. How am I supposed to do that when it would take me a thousand years to try to make up for what I've done?"

"If redemption were limited to those who had atoned for all their past crimes, no one would redeem at all," Zif says. And she might have said more, but I'm saved by the door opening to let in the Seneschal of this place, and someone who I haven't seen here before.

"In my office," Ian says. It doesn't bother me to receive such cool, blunt words from someone who has the excuse of being an Elohite. I follow him back into the office, take my accustomed seat. The newcomer, a pale woman with very red hair, gives me a curious look and sits down in the remaining chair.

"Tamah, an Ofanite of Lightning," Sean says, with the briefest of gestures to the woman. "Maharang, a Lilim." A gesture to me. I wish he wouldn't use that name; it gives me unpleasant memories of Mother. I could hardly expect an Elohite of Lightning to be anything but precise, so I don't argue with the introduction.

She's drumming her fingers along the arm of the chair already, and it's a familiar gesture to see. "Pleased to meet you," she says, offering me a hand.

I take it. "Please call me Mannie."

"Sure." A quick smile for me, and then she's whipping tubes out of the duffel bag she carries, dropping them onto the wide, spotless desk in front of us. "I couldn't get everything, but I did grab a lot before I had to run. Hope it'll be of some use. Did you want me to stick around, or should I see if anyone else needs a hand around here?"

"Stay for the moment," Ian says. He opens one tube, and unrolls the papers within. Schematics, wiring diagrams... I find myself up and leaning over the desk to take a closer look before I've half realized I'm moving. "We may want more information about where you got these and what else you saw that you were unable to bring," he continues, but I'm already leafing through the pages.

"Hari," I say. "He never did have a proper grasp of good wiring techniques. I can see this working, but not without some major changes. If this is more than a first draft, he's gone downhill since I was last unfortunate enough to witness his work. And--is he really trying to run a current through that? He'd be lucky to run this thing for five minutes without shorting the whole thing out."

"You know the demon who came up with these?" She's giving me the dubious look that most of the angels who meet me for the first time in here do, as if she's just realized I'm still, ah, demonic, as it were. 

"Know him, knew him..." I wave it away. I'd rather not get into a discussion about that particular Habbalite. My own poor little laboratory is long gone and given over now, and it's pointless to hold grudges in a fight over something I don't want anymore. (I would like to think I don't want it anymore; some nights, I do wonder, when everyone else here has an office, projects to work on, and I'm as bored as an Ofanite on a road trip who's not being allowed to drive.) "He was always better politicking than he was at science. You should have seen his design for robot ninjas. An absolute mockery of basic principles."

"Robot ninjas?" Tamah asks.

"Yes, I _told_ him the proper plural term is ninja, but it's not like he would listen. I think he managed to complete one marginally functional prototype, but it fell off a ledge on its way to its first mission." I amend, because I am supposed to be practicing honesty while I'm here, "It didn't so much _fall_ off a ledge as it was _pushed_ , but it wouldn't have worked properly anyway. He outsourced that project, so it was his own fault."

"So you can...interpret these schematics?" Ian again, always one to return to the matter at hand.

"It's a piss-poor set of plans for anything, but, yes, I should be able to figure out what that twisted little mind _intended_ these things to do, and with a bit of extra effort, also discover what this thing would _actually_ do." Another tube on the table, and I pull those open too. "It will take me a few hours to cover all the possibilities, though. How soon do you want to know?"

"As soon as reasonably possible." Exactly the answer I expected from him. He pulls away the papers and rolls them neatly back together, puts them in the tubes. "I'll have Zif show you to a room where you can work on these. Tamah will assist with other duties here until you're finished, so that you may call her if you need more information."

I'll find an excuse to call her over even if I don't need more information about the labs these were stolen from. I'd like another point of view on what Ofanim are like, if only so that I have a better idea of how to deal with them. "Thank you," I say, and surprise myself by meaning it. "I'll have the report to you as soon as it's ready."

"That would be acceptable." He nods to me, a sign to let him get back to other duties, and I'm just as eager to get a good start on these plans as he is to have me do so. Though I suppose Elohim don't do "eager" so much as they judge the situation and decide haste is appropriate.

Zif leads me down the hallway to one of the smaller conference rooms, Tamah skipping along beside us. "It's good that you have something to do," she says, "if only so that you're not trying to rewire the electrical system again," and that sounded almost like an attempt at humor on her part.

"I only tried once," I said. "It was an inefficient design that would have benefited from the change." Schematics begin to spread all across the table as Tamah pulls them out of their tubes, flawed designs that need correction and analysis of their failures. If I just had a pot of coffee and some way of playing Ride of the Valkyries while working on this, life would be very nearly perfect.

Ah, but I have an Ofanite handy. "Tamah, do you know where they keep the coffee around here?"

"I'll grab us a pot," she says, and darts from the room. There's a certain lovely pell-mell style to how Ofanim move, as if every part of their body wants to be the part making them move forward, all at the same time. 

Searching through my pockets for a pen that's still good, I find the little origami crane, and I set it in the middle of the table, as if it were supervising the whole affair. "Cute," Tamah says, returning with an entire coffeemaker in her arms, mugs and sugar packets and a canister of fake creamer all piled about on top. "You do origami?"

"No," I say. And can't resist continuing, "An Archangel gave it to me."

She sets everything down in a single coordinated clatter that somehow avoids breaking anything or even mussing the papers we've pulled out. "Huh," she says, and peers more closely at it. "Doesn't look like Jean's style."

"Different one," I say, and pull out my favorite notebook, and I get to work. There's a report to be written.


	15. In Which Various Types Of Advice Are Delivered

I figure out where I am again with Zif holding me, surprisingly strong for her vessel, and it shouldn't surprise me one bit, she is a Cherub. "Back now?" she asks, and I blink several times at the wall. It's just an ordinary wall. Nothing to see here. Move along.

There's someone in the background babbling apologies, and Zif must be able to see my expression, because she lets go of me and hustles whoever it was out the door. Some Kyriotate in a body I'm not much familiar with, riding a local scientist about for a few hours to deliver reports here. Unimportant. Irrelevant.

Zif closes the door behind it. I'm growing fond of doors and locks, in here. It means that other things and people are locked safely away outside. In the center of a Tether of Lightning, security coming out the very vents, I could not possibly be safer than I am now. I have an actual _Cherub_ attuned to me, keeping tabs on me from a distance precisely judged by my needs. It doesn't get any safer than this. It doesn't.

My breathing is almost even, again.

If my darling impulsive little Ofanite were here, he'd be babbling about ballet and music and other things I've never felt a need to understand until recently, and walking me in a circle until I could think straight again. But Zif is a Cherub who's nearer to Elohite than her own Choir, so she sits down neatly on one of the chairs around the conference table, and waits for me to say something.

I could be silent for hours, and she would wait there, watching. Might as well speak and get it over with.

The unspoken question is the one psychologists around the world are known for, so I answer that one first. "I hate it. I hate how it makes me feel, I hate what it makes me do, I hate the loss of control, I hate how _stupid_ it is. To respond like that to a _word_. If he were here," and there's a wave of terror just waiting to unleash at the very thought, but if I don't say the name I can hold it back, "it would be reasonable to be terrified. There is no reason for me to be afraid of his name. I _hate_ it."

Zif mms, noncommittally. "You were forced into a situation where acquiring Discord was inevitable. The nature of Discord is that it can't be controlled. Which do you fear more; your response, or the lack of control?"

"It's a toss-up." I hate the way it makes people look at me, a pitiful thing in need of sympathy. And everyone here keeps trying to _fix_ me.

Fine. I'm broken. But I'm a competent mechanic in my own right. "Are you done asking questions?"

"For now," she says, and tilts her head at me. "You're still shaking. You ought to do something to take your mind off things."

I close my hands into fists until they stop moving. There is no reason to be afraid. None at all. "I don't suppose Ian has anything new for me to look at?"

"Mm. No. And I don't think reading over such things would be good for you right now."

"What do you expect me to do?" Jack and Kelly would have already crept out, broken through the security systems, run laughing into the night. Kai would be a whirlwind of activity, making things or just moving, anything to occupy his mind. And I...study. I plan. I design, dissect the designs of others, improve things.

If they don't want me to do what I can do well, I don't know what else to turn to.

She smiles, a small twitch of her lips. "Something that has nothing to do with any of your skills. You need a hobby. Something to help you relax."

"Fine," I say, and throw up my hands. "I'll find something utterly _useless_ to do. And you think this will help?"

"Maybe," she says.

I take a few minutes to stalk through the halls. I'm politely confined to this secured wing, and it's wearing on my nerves. It's not that I haven't spent weeks, months, an entire decade once inside a single laboratory, but in those cases I was always doing something. I had a project, people to supervise, things to be _done_. Here, they toss me something handy if no one else has the time, to keep me occupied and from going completely mad.

Why couldn't I have had a Discord that made me unusually compassionate, or angry, or sprout horns from my vessel? Those would be so much easier to deal with than this stupid, pointless fear.

There's a small library at the end of the hallway, bookcases full of good paper bound up with stitches and glue. It's not much used, not with everything available on computers these days, and that annoys me more than it ought to. I've always been one to favor progress, but what's wrong with books? I like books. They stay where they are, and people don't hack in and change the information when you're not looking. All you have to do to keep the information on paper secure is stick it in a box with a lock on it. Computers are over-rated.

Most of the books are slightly out-dated by human standards, dreadfully obsolete by the standards of Lightning or--well, by any celestial standards. I find a copy of the _Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica_ , though not in the original language, and settle down to take my mind off of things, so far as I'm able.

It doesn't take my mind off of things.

There's a phone in here, standard office equipment. I take a moment to lock the door. Most of the angels have the keys or means to open it, but it's one way to express a desire for privacy that they'll respect unless something urgent comes up.

Nine for an outside line, my long distance code for whatever purposes they use such tracking methods for, and then the number I've memorized. At this time of day Kai ought to be home for lunch, and if he hasn't set the kitchen on fire again, it's a good time to catch him.

"Hi!" Breathless, as if he's just been running somewhere. He's always just been running somewhere. "Hey, Mannie! Good to hear from you!"

"You finally got caller ID, I see."

"Yeah, Jack set it up for me, I'm not clear on how it works, but he said it might come in handy, especially if someone calls while my triad's visiting, though I don't know what that would have to do with anything. What's up?"

A thousand things I could say, but I'd rather not, so I switch into my own version of Zif's therapist mode. "Calling to see how you're doing. How did the recital go?"

"Oh, it was great, wish you could have seen it. The advanced class was absolutely _perfect_ the whole way through, it was beautiful." I can hear footsteps as he paces around the room. "Everyone did really well, even the beginner class, and Emma recovered _really_ well from a fall, I was so proud of her."

"Recovered well? She was hurt?" This is what I needed to relax, letting his bouncy babble wash over me and wear all the sharp edges off of my thoughts.

"No, no, she wasn't hurt at all. I mean, she kept right on going. You have to do that in a performance. If you make a mistake, it's not like the whole thing will stop so you can go back and do it over properly; the music's still playing, everyone else is still dancing, gotta keep up with things! It's one of the things we teach in class, how to recover from a mistake. Get back up, get back into place, and keep going as best you can. You can't let one fall bother you, or you'll be off-balance for the entire performance, which makes it worse."

"Ah. I see." I find that I've taken to pacing around the room when I'm on a cordless phone like this, and it appears I have picked up a few habits from the Ofanite. "I'm glad to hear it went well, then. And that Jack is back on his feet."

"Yeah, though Kelly's still stuck upstairs until she manages to do enough that Janus isn't so annoyed at all the vessels she lost. Which I do feel bad about, as at least two of them were my fault--"

"Don't worry about it," I say. "The first time you had no choice in the matter, and the second time was an accident."

"A stupid accident, though. I should've been more careful." A small sigh, but his tone bounces right back. "So I'll know better for next time! Live and learn, keep on moving... Are they keeping you busy, there?"

"Busy enough." If I ask for a few more notebooks just for personal use they surely won't mind, and I can work on...projects. Nice, safe projects. Or write up sufficient proof to demonstrate why they ought to let me rewire the building. "They don't seem to quite know what to do with me, sometimes. Or they treat me like I might go running off into the night if they say the wrong thing." Not that I haven't been tempted some nights, but in here I am...safe. There are things outside that would like to tear me to pieces, and I'd rather not give them the satisfaction.

"You should take up a hobby. It'll keep you entertained until you've figured out what to do. How about the violin? You said you used to play that. Huh. I wonder if anyone's ever done an electric violin the way they've done electric guitars... I'll have to look it up."

"People keep saying that," I say, and because he's already run halfway on past the point I was addressing, "about a hobby. And, ah, you seem to be under the impression it's _my_ choice as to what to do in this situation."

"You're the one who started this trip, Mannie. I think you're the one who has to finish it." And if anyone else said that, it would sound like an accusation, but he's only speaking his mind, as helpful as ever. "Maybe they're waiting for you to decide you're ready to do something."

"What if I'm never ready?"

I didn't mean to say that. He has that effect on me. His words spin around in so many directions, I start actually saying what's on my mind.

"Never is an awfully long time, Mannie. I know I'd get bored stiff trying to make up my mind for that long." A pause, and, "I have to run, I have class starting in ten minutes. I'll call you when I get back, okay?"

"Thanks," I say, and then hang up, because I know he'll try to stay on the line until I do.

I still have a fifth of a notepad in my jacket, from the motel in Seattle. By the time I'm back at the conference room where Zif is waiting, I've sketched out a preliminary design for an electric violin.


	16. In Which The Decision Is Mine

The clock on the wall says it's two minutes to midnight. Considering where I am, I have no doubt that the clock is synchronized with the official atomic clock, to the millisecond. Or perhaps Lightning has its own atomic clock, set to some higher standard than humans can reach. It wouldn't surprise me; they seem to be very much about higher standards than humans can reach. Something of a theme.

I have an appointment in forty-six minutes. Zif tells me that honesty to myself is nearly as important as honest to others, so I'll be truthful: I am not scared senseless. No, scared senseless is when someone mentions _his_ name. I'm only terrified in a normal way.

It would be nice to go a few days without wanting to curl up in a corner and whimper. Just for a change of pace.

Zif isn't commenting on the sunglasses I'm wearing. I can appreciate that. She does look slightly concerned, which means I'm showing more of my anxiety than I'd like to. Or maybe it's that she knows me well enough by now to realize what I'd be feeling, whether I show it or not. "Anxiety is unproductive," she says. "There's no reason to be worried."

"On the day when my emotions are controlled entirely by what's productive and reasonable, I'll have managed to transform myself into an Elohite. I don't believe that's happening any time soon." I'd prefer to be working on something, but there'd be too much chance of becoming distracted and being late to the appointment, which would make a bad first impression. Especially with this Archangel, of all of them.

I've only met a Superior from the, ah, other side once before. He wore a friend's body, and saved me from certain consequences that would have been much worse than simple annihilation. He smiled at me, and handed me a bit of paper he'd folded into an origami frog, and gave me good advice. It was still terrifying. Nothing I've heard about this particular Archangel gives me reason to believe he'll be _reassuring_ , by any means.

Thirty-eight minutes. Zif is working on one of her projects, something not so confidential that she wouldn't work in front of me, but not so open to discussion that she'd actually explain it to me if I asked. I have absolutely nothing to do. If I had a phone I would call--but no, that's a bad idea. I can't go running to call every time I have a bad day, or I'll get nothing done at all.

Still. It might help.

"I need coffee," I say, and stand up. Zif only nods briefly. I can certainly get a cup of coffee and be back within, ah, thirty-four minutes. Even with a stop on the way to make a very brief call.

Coffee first; I was never fond of it before, but I've grown accustomed to using it as a way of occupying my mind, distracting other people from an issue, or giving myself something to do. And then to the library, the phone, waiting for someone to pick up on the other end.

A ring and a half in; he must have been in a completely different room to let it go that long, or distracted. "Hi, Mannie. What's up?"

The door to the library is closed. I might as well be honest. "I have an appointment with an Archangel in a little over twenty minutes. Preliminary things. If I'm lucky, he might do something about my Discord. It's...nothing serious yet."

"And you're twitchy."

"I am _not_ \--ah. Well. I suppose could describe it that way." He doesn't have to sound so amused.

"I could tell you to relax, but I bet everyone else told you that. Never met him myself, so I can't tell you what he's like beyond what you've already heard. But look at it this way! You could be meeting with all sorts of other people you'd have greater reason to be nervous about. Jordi. Laurence. Dominic. Michael..."

I twitch, and I can hear him laughing on the other end. "Come on, Mannie," he says, as if I'm an old friend who's only worrying about presenting an important report. "Sure, it's going to be intimidating, but you'll deal. You're competent, sincere, and you asked for the meeting. That has to count for something."

"I'm more than competent. I am _good_ at what I do." He's pushing for that, and I'm happy to oblige. It's a touch of comfort tonight.

"See? Nothing to worry about. And, hey, humble. Archangels dig that."

He's definitely laughing at me now, and I can't blame him for it. "Excuse me for being discomfited by the prospect of meeting someone who would have been trying to smash me into pulp if I'd managed to get the Word I was once shooting for."

"Nah, he'd probably have tried to redeem you first. It'd be a waste to lose someone as competent--excuse me, as _good_ as you, right?"

"And he's...efficient."

"Very. Or so I'm told. I mostly admire Lightning for the explosions and spiffy devices, but I'm told they're the model of efficient, skilled, so on and so forth. But what would I know? I do music, dance, and sometimes hitting things. Science isn't my field of expertise."

"That's the truth." I wouldn't trust Kai near anything mechanical unless he was attempting to drive it, and even then I'd make sure to wear a seatbelt.

"Oh. Um. Half a sec!" The receiver drops to the ground with a thud on the other end, and I wait for a minute while somewhere in his apartment--ah, the sound of a fire extinguisher. "Sorry about that," he says, once he's back. "I forgot about the eggs. You'd think scrambled eggs would be _easy_ , right? Go figure."

"I swear, you could set things on fire trying to boil water."

"Only once! And the fire was very small, and Nomikos helped me put it out, and Adala said that all things considered she didn't want a cup of tea anymore, so it was okay."

His triad is brave indeed, to show up at his place not clothed in asbestos. I should be thankful we never stopped long at a place with a kitchen.

Things were simpler when I was just trying to outrun my fellow coworkers, my former Superior, and the Game. As objectives go, "Don't get caught" is one of the more focused ones.

I've missed a few sentences, something about his triad and coffee and reports, none of it urgent. My watch tells me it's five minutes until my appointment. "I need to go, Kai."

"Good luck. And thanks for calling." A brief hesitation, as close as he comes to seriously considering something before saying it. "Let me know how it goes?"

"I'll do that."

My coffee has gone lukewarm. I pour it out in the sink in the kitchen, refill the cup, and go back to the room where Zif is waiting. She says nothing about how getting coffee doesn't take that long. Surely Cherubim aren't meant to have this sort of insight into people? Or perhaps it's only that I'm easy to read, these days.

Maybe I'm overanalyzing things.

I was expecting something grander, if only from experience with _him_. A bolt of lightning from nowhere, sparkling light coalescing into a shape... A touch of drama. But it's only that the two of us are sitting at the conference table, and then there's a third person at the head of the table, as if he's been there all along.

Precisely on time. Of course.

He opens up a briefcase. "I've read the reports sent to me by people you've been dealing with," he begins, directly to the point. I can appreciate that. "Highly subjective, but informative in their own way." Neatly typed stapled stacks of paper pulled out one at a time, a visual aid to remind me that he knows...more than I know he does, likely more than I suspect. The last one to go on top of the stack is written on notebook paper. From where I'm sitting I can see that it was written in pen up until a large ink splotch, and continues in crayon afterwards.

Kai sent in a personal recommendation? I'm not sure if I ought to be flattered or nervous. His notes make for strange results.

"You wished to speak to me about a matter of some Discord you acquired while going Renegade." An even look, and I'm reminded that I did ask for this meeting, so it behooves me to do something other than sit here dumbly.

"Yes." A 'sir' just doesn't feel appropriate at the moment, leaving my phrase sounding all stilted. And I'm sliding down in my chair, as if making myself look smaller and more in need of sympathy would be useful. Ridiculous, in these circumstances. I will sit up straight and act _competent_. "When I broke my Heart, I found that I had acquired a, ah, phobia of my former Superior. Which under the circumstances would be entirely reasonable, except that it's too easily triggered by mention. Of his name." My hands are shaking again, trying to talk about it. "This is...more than inconvenient. Especially if I'm trying to provide any information to the people here about, ah, the interpretation of certain documents." And now I've babbled on long enough. It's not as if he doesn't know all of what I've said.

His expression is cool, distant. I think I would have to run screaming if he looked kind. "The request is reasonable," he says, "if you intend to work for my organization. To do so for long would require further changes on your part."

"I know." And because it requires more explanation than that, "The necessary criteria for attempting that change successfully are, ah, poorly documented. I hesitate to take the risk without more data than I have available, but it seems there _is_ no more data for me to acquire on this subject." I could wait forever on this and never be sure, I'll have to make a decision eventually... But not yet.

A fractional nod on his part. "Then you intend to work for me should the attempt be successful."

"I can hardly imagine myself anywhere else." Except maybe in Creation, and I don't think Eli is taking new Servitors at the moment. Besides, I'd have to take up a hobby, and I'm not good at hobbies. My violin-playing never reached further than adequate. "And at least with, ah, in your organization, I don't think I would find myself on projects so ridiculous as some I've been assigned before."

"Such as?" I can feel the slightest touch somewhere inside me, as if I've just walked through someone in celestial form. I could sing for the relief of it, but he's asked a question.

"Lightsabers. I don't know who let him watch those movies. I don't know why they were stupid enough to let him watch those movies. Lightsaber...reliquaries. He wanted them to be powered from the reliquary built into the hilt, and function _precisely_ like they did in the movies, down to cutting through steel, deflecting each other, shutting on and off with that particular sound effect..." The shudder is nearly one of nostalgia at the memory. "Ten years on that damn project before he gave up and went for battle droids instead, and I'm only counting the time I spent working on it. The entire laboratory got together to send George Lucas an appreciative note when the sequel came out to distract him. At least I didn't get assigned to the Death Star project."

"The Death Star project?" If I didn't know better, I'd say he sounded as if he were dreading my response.

"Yes. It was the stupidest project _ever_. Well. Not ever, but in a good long while. It's a massive undertaking. It would require decades of design, testing, redesign, bug-correction, the _labor_ alone in building, and for what? A machine that can blow up planets? What would he do with it? Where would he _put_ it? What's the point of having a machine that can blow up a planet anyway? None of the other Princes aside from Saminga would have let him use it in the first place! And if they ever _finish_ working on that thing, no doubt he'll even insist that the people running it wear those weird black helmets, because that's how its done! It's fucking _insane_ is what it is, and you can't _say_ that, so you just end up standing there nodding and grinning and trying to figure out how the hell you can avoid being assigned to the project! It's what happens when your boss is a Habbalite! They're too damn _crazy_ to give reasonable guidelines!"

I probably shouldn't be shouting at an Archangel. Deep breaths. "In short, I suspect I would be far more comfortable in the service of Lightning, judging by the evidence of what I've seen here. Should you care to have me." Which he must, or he wouldn't be here now, but it's bad form to assume that people will do what you think is most reasonable. They'll so often disappoint. 

Another fractional nod. "When will you be prepared for redemption?"

He would ask the difficult questions. "I don't know. But I can't stay here like this forever."

"Send a message when you're ready, then." No lightning back up into the roof or flash of light, only that he's gone again, the meeting over. He has other things to be working on.

"How are you feeling?" Zif tilts her head just so. 

"I wish I could take a walk outside."

"It would be a bad idea."

"Very. Which doesn't stop me from wanting it." And because her expression speaks of potential concern, "You don't need to worry about it. I'll be in the library."

I've been spending a great deal of time on the phone of late. Zif tells me that forming connections with other people is a sign of personal growth, and a healthy adjustment to moving from the overly hostile environment of Hell to a less aggressive environment. Unspoken is the assumption that so long as I'm forming connections with other people, it ought to be with other angels. She may be right. A month ago, the idea of redemption was ludicrous, a last-minute attempt to save my last vessel from being skewered by a blackwing who wouldn't have thought twice about it. 

And now? I've met two Archangels, I'm wandering the hallways of a Tether of Lightning, and the closest thing to a friend I have is a batty little Ofanite who I've lied to a dozen times, and he hasn't held any of it against me. And I thought my previous job had its odd moments.

"How did it go?" The phone barely had a chance to ring. He must have been waiting there for me to call, and that's a strange thing to picture. An Ofanite waiting for something to happen.

"Better than I expected," I say, and lean back on the couch, prop my feet up on one arm in an untidy manner. "I made a complete idiot of myself, but he was kind enough to take away my Discord, so I consider it a more than fair trade."

"You're too hard on yourself. I'm sure you did fine."

He believes that, doesn't he? He always was a bit light on the Ethereal Forces, but it's strangely reassuring to have his full confidence in me. Not that I deserve it, now or for a long time to come. "You say I'm too hard on myself? I'm not the one who beat himself up over taking out a Malakite. A Malakite, Kai. Coming back again is what they're known for." That and their unrelentingly hostile approach to demons, but that's not relevant. "I'd like to think that I have the ability to assess my own performance in an objective manner."

"You're a pessimist, is what you are." He has the television on in the background, something to keep him distracted in the night while he's trying to maintain a Role, pretending he sleeps like humans do. It must be strange to hold a steady Role as an Ofanite, playing the game of staying inside and doing nothing for six hours of every day. "You need to get out a little, or find a way to relax. Have you considered--"

"Taking up a hobby? It's only the sixth time you've suggested it. At this rate I'll have to begin playing the violin again just to have a little peace and quiet."

"Violin and bagpipes. We'd make a great duet."

My mind recoils at trying to imagine the combination. "On second thought, maybe I'll take up watercolors. They're supposed to be relaxing."

"Not a bad idea. But what topic are you trying to avoid talking about?" A faint chuckle at my silence. "Come on, Mannie. I may not be as smart as you are, but I'm not a complete idiot. Not most of the time."

"I'd rather not talk about it." Honest enough that I won't feel guilty about it, without venturing into territory I'd rather not visit. "Tell me about your day, ask a question, something else."

"Fine," he says. He's channel-surfing while he's talking; I can hear the voices and music in the background snap from one vapid line to another. "I wish I could talk to you in person. It's so much easier. If they'd just tell me where you are--but, hey, I can understand the security concern. None of my business. Questions, right. Um. Here's one, you don't have to answer if you don't want to. What does it feel like to lose a Force?"

"Everyone is asking me the hard questions today," I say.

"I could ask another one, if you'd like. If you were a tree, what kind of tree would--"

"No, it's a legitimate question, thank you." Watching Kai come up with ideas is almost as frightening as Vapula doing so, if on a much smaller scale.

And the name doesn't...frighten me. Not anymore. I can, in an almost objective way, tell myself that I am safe here, I will continue to be safe, and that mad Demon Prince can occupy himself with a thousand idiot, genius projects without any of my help.

There are so many things I could do, with the resources being offered to me. All the ideas I've never had time to explore, every prototype I've never had the budget to build and test, the plans I left behind when I fled Russia and never yet had an opportunity to reconstruct--

"Mannie? You still there?"

"Yes," I say. "Just...realizing certain possibilities."

"Are you going to be okay?"

"Certainly," I say. "I'm going to be fine."

For the rest of the conversation, I let him do most of the talking. It's easier that way, and it's not as if he runs out of things to say.

When I find Zif again she's in her office, not the official one where the humans who work in this facility come to pour out their feelings and frustrations to her, but the tidy little room where she does her real work. Nothing frivolous in the entire place but the cut-glass lampshade in the back. She indicates a seat when I enter; I sit and wait for her to finish her current task.

"How did your conversation go?" A therapist's tone: neutral, bordering on encouraging.

"Well enough. Listening to him talk is...different." If Kai worked for Novalis, I'd say trying to understand his perspective was like looking through rose-colored glasses, but he's too enthusiastic about attacking the forces of evil for the metaphor to work. "I'd like to speak with Jean again, when he has the time." I feel like half a fool to say this so soon after he already made the time for me, but I'd rather not lose the courage while I'm still holding so tenuously to it.

"I'll let him know," she says, and no doubt the email is gone even as she says it. 

She pushes her laptop aside, a few centimeters, it's enough to show that she intends to give me her full attention. In case I need to confess, ask for reassurance. Anything I need.

Very well. I'll confess. "I didn't tell him."

"Why not?"

"He would worry."

That small nod. I now know where she gets it from. "And you feel guilty about this."

"Possibly. Is it appropriate to feel guilty for something like that?"

"If you believe he would be disappointed by the action, perhaps."

"He would forgive me in an instant." No wonder I feel guilty. It's like closing the door on a puppy.

Jean is here between breaths. Disconcerting, how he does that. Reassuring, that he feels no need for fanfare. I had expected to wait longer. "What do you want?" he asks. He might as well be asking me what I Need.

"To change." To learn ballet, if Kai's metaphor is appropriate. I will take a moment to laugh at the mental image of Jean in a tutu some other time, some time after this. Not now.

"What are you afraid of?"

"Entropy."

With anyone else I would have to explain. But he understands with that word everything I mean from hypothesis to conclusion.

No more time for thinking. The only thing I have to lose in this gamble is myself.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Drabble: Kai's Power Cute](https://archiveofourown.org/works/1002739) by [Archangel_Beth](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Archangel_Beth/pseuds/Archangel_Beth)




End file.
